So Much to Do and So Little Time

President Monson, President Faust, President Bateman, fellow graduates, and ladies and gentlemen, when I was offered this high honor, I knew there must be a catch. Must I forgive Danny Ainge for destroying my alma mater, Notre Dame, in the 1980 NCAA playoffs? I recall with horror that he raced the length of the floor—from coast to coast, as it were—to sink a layup at the buzzer to beat Notre Dame 51 to 50. Must I forgive BYU for again humiliating Notre Dame in 1994 in Notre Dame Stadium: BYU 21, Notre Dame 14? However, I was assured I would not be obliged to forgive nor to forget—not even obliged to tithe—and I stand here today before you purring like a contented cougar.

Your recognition of me today for service to our great community I do receive with purring pride but also with a feeling of guilt. How can one in good conscience accept an award for being in love?

All of my life the state of Utah and its people have been a love affair for me. I hope that that will be the experience of each of you who receive a diploma and that you will feel the responsibility to move swiftly and resolutely into the affairs of your own community to help it and the world do whatever must be done in the never-ending struggle for human progress and equal opportunity. I say “move swiftly” with emphasis. There is so little time for any individual to make a meaningful contribution to that progress.

Regardless of profession or whatever niche in society that fate places us, each of us as a member of the human race inherits obligations and goals that we must assiduously pursue but too often take too long to achieve. When sixty-three years ago I was hired by the Salt Lake Tribune, we were urging a city-county merger into a taxpayer-friendly, welfare-enabling form of government. We are still urging it.

Precious few goals to better this world, or even our own little part of it, are achievable in one lifetime. Time—that exasperating factor in every worldly endeavor—intervenes between inspiration and achievement. Often there is not enough time. More often there is too much. Many opportunities are lost with the waste of time.

After a century of universal recognition of the Great Salt Lake as a mineral and chemical treasury, sixteen years of costly research, design, and construction were consumed before the magnesium project—which now provides 10 percent of the world’s magnesium supply—produced its first ingot. It took twenty more years of perfecting the process and being frustrated in the marketplace before the project realized a significant profit on its huge investment. And just this year will its pollution problem finally be resolved. All of this to create only 400 jobs so important to the daily-bread progress for which we strive throughout all society.

How long have we talked of Utah energy potentials in tars, in shales, and in geothermal, wind, and nuclear resources? How long have we cried for an energy policy to guide us and our neighbors to a long-term solution? Still there is no long-term solution. Today we are in an energy crisis, the cost of which many of us and many job providers cannot afford.

It took seventy years and Olympic bid publicity starting in 1965 for the world to discover “The Greatest Snow on Earth” and to make my hometown, Park City, the wealthiest city per capita in the state and replace manyfold the jobs lost when the mines quit operation.

The Salt Palace Convention Center, the year-round keystone of our booming tourism business, took twenty years to bring into being. It took twenty more years to see tourism mature into Utah’s foremost industry and provide many of those necessary daily-bread jobs essential to the advancement of our society.

Way back when I couldn’t wait for Christmas, I was taught that patience is a great virtue. Tiny daughters with no voice in the selection were named Patience. I have learned through most of the past century that it is impatience that is the true virtue. I suggested the name Impatience for my only daughter, but I was instantly and sharply overruled by her mother.

I urge you, I plead with you, in your lifelong effort to make this a happier place to live for your immediate family and for the family of mankind, to be unrelentingly impatient.

I have cited political and commercial frustrations in the timely increase of breadwinning employment to illustrate the stifling effect of time. Social progress is wholly dependent upon political and economic engines whose wheels move slowly because too many of us are too patient.

We cannot live by bread alone, but we must have our daily bread to live, and so must all persons, all peoples, if any of us is to fully enjoy our brief stay on this earth with a free conscience. Daily bread for everyone requires jobs for everyone physically, mentally, and emotionally able so as to assure adequate care for those who are not able. All men are created equal, it is true, but mostly in the eyes of God. It remains for us who enjoy equality in sharing the bounty of this earth to provide equal opportunity to others. Equal opportunity is not denied by God but by those whose gods are greed, selfishness, and oppression—the creators of poverty and starvation.

Most churches perform great works of charity worldwide. None does more per member than the church that owns this university. Significant aid to disaster victims is limited by available resources, however. It is said that the slowly starving and otherwise underprivileged make up more than one-fourth of the earth’s population. The problem of nourishing them is of such magnitude that it can be solved only through the combined and coordinated efforts of all prosperous nations, led by their good Samaritans and all organizations dedicated to the world’s social well-being.

The millennium of one world can be achieved in your lifetime—certainly in your children’s lifetime—if all the haves are inspired to share just a small portion of their largess with the have-nots. Enough food is produced or could be produced today to feed the world. Hundreds of thousands die of malnutrition every day while millions of acres lie fallow or, worse, the lifesaving food that is produced is wasted for lack of equitable distribution.

Great projects to achieve human progress are constantly undertaken and forever underway. Some succeed. Many fail. The overall result is an inching ahead rather than the giant strides that are achievable if the world united in peace and love and in giving service to each other and to all others.

Communication is essential to speed up that process. Communication is the vital catalyst of progress—the one effective offensive against time. We have superb communication tools, especially now that we have the World Wide Web, which properly utilized can be the answer to the confusion of the Tower of Babel.

In America we have found in democratic capitalism, imperfect though it is, the best hope for one world—the best, and perhaps the last, hope to achieve the ultimate goal of providing to all mankind the equal opportunity to enjoy this God-given earth.

J. Golden Kimball once said:

I love all of God’s children, but there’s some of them I love a damn sight more than I do others. [Quoted in Austin Fife and Alta Fife, Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), 305]

I agree. I agree with J. Golden, a great man I had the privilege to know. I believe we are free to pick and choose our friends who are well fed, well clothed, and well housed, but I also believe we are mandated to love and serve all of our neighbors who are not.

So let us hang up the caps and gowns we so proudly wear today, take the cloth of the good Samaritan, and, with the determination of Danny Ainge, go coast to coast and around the world with the good news that we love our neighbors and that each of us will do whatever we can, whatever must be done, to bring self-sufficiency to all. It is a life worth living. There is so much to do and so little time. God speed you on life’s most rewarding journey, and God bless us all.

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