[Applause]
thank you very much thank you so much
well I'm so grateful to be a recipient
of this award and to be keeping such
extraordinary company I first of all
want to thank all of you who were
involved in making this possible but the
main thing that I want to do here is to
just say how I'm inspired by the young
people who are represented here because
I think that's the purpose ultimately of
this foundation and I want to tell just
a brief story because Archbishop Tutu is
here one of my heroes and let you know
where I was when I was about your age
I'm really dating myself now although
I'm also dating the archbishop because
back in 1979 I was a freshman in college
at Occidental College in California and
I had had a somewhat rocky youth and in
teenage years my father wasn't at home I
was growing up partly with my
grandparents in high school I'd gotten
in trouble occasionally was what my
mother called a goodtime charlie
meaning I wasn't really serious in terms
of my studies in terms of my work had
some awareness of the world around me
had some sense of injustice and
unfairness but it wasn't finely honed it
wasn't well developed and I remember in
1979 arriving as a freshman and doing
what freshmen do you know trying to
figure out what courses are and trying
to change your study habits and trying
to identify that food in the cafeteria
what it is and we were visited on campus
by a couple of gentlemen from South
Africa who were representatives the ANC
in 1979-1980 and they spoke about their
efforts to overcome apartheid
and for about an hour
myself and a group of students listened
to these young men who were not much
older than we were I described the
extraordinary struggles they were going
through the sacrifices that were being
made people who were enduring jail and
torture and beatings because they had a
sense that somehow someway justice would
prevail and that that brief meeting I
think in some ways changed my life
because what it told me first of all was
that ordinary people can do
extraordinary things when they're given
an opportunity we sometimes think that
our leaders have to be have fancy
degrees or well educated or some public
office somewhere these young men had not
none of those things but what they
possessed was a anger over injustice
that they were able to channel in a
constructive positive way and I thought
to myself that they gave me some sense
of the direction that my life might go
and so I became active in the
anti-apartheid movement on campuses and
I'm not sure we were particularly
effective as I recall Occidental College
continued to refuse to divest despite
the various protests that we organized
his students I transferred to Columbia
and there was similar resistance on
Columbia's campus but over time I like
to think that I was part of that mosaic
that applied pressure and ultimately
helped those in South Africa achieve the
extraordinary liberation that I would
witness almost ten years later a night
as a as a law student and I remember the
image of Nelson Mandela walking out of
prison and understanding that a seminal
moment in history had occurred and that
Mandela's long march towards freedom was
not his alone but was part of thousands
of footsteps of millions of footsteps of
people all around the
and I traced back me getting involved in
politics to that moment because I as a
consequence of that organizing on a
college campus I became a community
organizer as a consequence of a
community organizer I after going back
to law school became a civil rights
attorney as a consequence of being a
civil rights attorney I entered the
state legislature and I now stand before
you as a United States Senator and as a
candidate for president and so the
primary message I guess I have in
receiving this award is that all of you
represent enormous potential and
enormous possibility for change because
we all know that injustice still exists
it exists it exists here in the United
States in every poor neighborhood and in
every inner city and every rural
community all across the country there
is quiet desperation young people's
lives are filled with sadness and
desperation and anarchy and chaos and
obviously all around the world we see
those same symptoms of hopelessness made
manifest in places like Darfur places
like the Middle East in places that too
often are forgotten about and not
written about until they flare up in
tragedy so I hope that all of you who
are on the brink of doing extraordinary
things I decided to channel that talent
and that energy and that imagination to
figuring out how do you move the process
along for a better history how do you
put your shoulder against the wheel and
move that boulder up the hill and I'm
absolutely confident that if all of you
take up that challenge the world is
waiting for you ready to be changed
because I think we live in this moment
in history right now where the hunger
for change the hunger for something new
the desire to break out of the ordinary
the self-interested the
Hedi the trivial is is everywhere and
they're waiting for you and so I hope
that as you see the recipients of this
award you recognize that it's actually
more of a tool to give you a little
spark and drive you in the wonderful
directions that I hope your lives take
in the years to come so thank you very
much
[Applause]
[Music]