A Message to the Graduating Class of 2005

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

I would like to start by thanking you for this opportunity to speak before you and am honored to help sum up the thoughts and perspectives of my cohort.

For all of us who have entered the M.A. program this has been an arduous process full of difficulties and strains. Yet even as we stand here before you today in celebration, it would be easy to fall into self-gratification, patting ourselves on the back at how successful we have become and how smart we are supposed to be. In fact, it would be worse than easy, but even dangerous. It would be dangerous in the sense that it would only reinforce the sentiment that we as Asian and Pacific Islanders have made it, when in fact, so many people in our community are still struggling not to succeed, but even just to survive. It would be dangerous in the sense that our congratulatory sentiments would drown out the cries of the world, when so many are in suffering. It would be dangerous, most of all because it would obscure the fact that what we need now is a little less pride, and a lot more humility and sacrifice.

We need more humility not in the sense that we shouldn’t stand up and fight for what we think is right. No, by humility I mean that when we open ourselves up to truly feeling our humanity and take up the burden of being an honest member of the human race, we can only ask ourselves these simple questions: How can we make more of a difference? What can we do to represent for those people who cannot be here today?

Thinking of my experiences in the community, I have seen our Asian and Pacific Islander brothers and sisters struggling. I have seen my friends live in constant fear in the "ghetto," trying to make ends meet. I have seen my friends addicted to drugs, wasting away before my eyes. I have friends who have been victimized by racially motivated hate crimes and borne witness to friends suffering domestic violence, purple spots running the length of an arm. And I have offered silent testimony to friends incarcerated for crimes real or imagined. These are the people that I think about who could not be here today.

Today there are two people that I think about especially. One of them was a friend of ours named Urfman, a young Filipino youth from Echo Park. Urfman was a quiet guy, kind of kept to himself a lot. For some reason, Urfman joined the army and went off to boot camp. We don’t know exactly what happened to him out there in boot camp, but eventually he got a dishonorable discharge and came back home. A few months later, he was dead of his own hand. We’ll never know why he did it, but we know that his experiences in boot camp contributed to it. Urfman is one of those people who could not be here today.

Another of those people is a youth named Arnold Moreno, who was another friend of ours. Arnold was a Salvadoran youth, practically raised as a Filipino, who succeeded in overcoming his early years in a gang to eventually graduate from high school and become a community activist. Arnold was hit by a Lincoln Navigator a half mile from his home and when the ambulance finally arrived, they took him all the way across town to L.A. County because he had no insurance. This happened regardless of the fact that three other hospitals were only a couple of blocks away. Arnold died of internal bleeding that we believe could have been treated if he had been seen sooner. Arnold Moreno is another of those people who could not be here today.

Humility. For me, there was nothing more humbling than when we were walking that line and carrying Arnold’s coffin to his final resting place. For even though I was an activist at the time, I knew that no amount of protesting or organizing could bring him back. All the rage and anger that those days caused me and my friends only confirmed what we already knew: That Arnold was gone and he was not coming back.

Yet even beyond those two names are the many thousands who we don’t know. Thousands across the city and state. Thousands across the country and around the world. Our fate is connected to them. We are connected to those thousands of young American people dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are also connected to those thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis that have been slaughtered in our name. And when we stand and face them, and recognize each name and each story as having meaning, how can we not be humbled in their presence? How do we look them straight in the face and say with all honesty that they have not died in vain?

Pat Sumi, an activist from the founding of the Asian American Movement said that sacrifice to her “meant all the ways in which you would have to give up something for something that you really had to believe was greater than yourself.” To her sacrifice meant that “you had to love ‘the people’ better than yourself,” and “you had to just be better human beings all the way around the block.”

These are terrible times, fraught with the gravest of challenges. We have a president in the White House who thinks that it’s okay to falsify evidence of weapons of mass destruction and to violate basic international principles of national sovereignty. We have a governor who is gutting our state educational system so that it has become even more difficult for young people to go to a university like UCLA. We have a country that for the last four years has been living in fear, and has been motivated by hate.

But that’s not to say that things will always stay the same. And for every challenge comes an opportunity. It is our charge now to use what we have learned to engage in the concrete task of changing reality. And though it may make our steps a bit heavier, if we all take a small part of this, then the load becomes more manageable. Through it all we must be willing to “serve the people” with the humility and sacrifice that only comes from acknowledging our profound responsibility. As Frantz Fanon once wrote "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it." Our mission is clear, and I would say that “The World is Yours,” and it is just ready for the taking. We have nothing to fear but our own destiny as part of this change. Let’s embrace it and get down to work, okay?

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