If you really want to make a difference, whether it’s in helping other people, or whether it’s in fighting for your country, or whether it’s in the political arena, or journalism, or physics, you’ve got to persevere. You’ve got to understand that there are going to be some enormous bumps in the road.

To so many people, I am no longer just myself. I am a reminder of a thought that is difficult for the rational brain to accept: that the elements that constitute our bodies might fail at any moment. When I originally got my diagnosis at age 35, all I could think to say was, “But I have a son.” It was the best argument I had. I can’t end. This world can’t end. It had just begun. A tragedy is like a fault line. A life is split into a before and an after, and most of the time, the before was better.

And because Fulbright was the chairman of the committee he had an automated — some sort of automated device that allowed the Pentagon to send him, every day, a list of the people who’d been killed in Vietnam from Arkansas. So I would go check it every day. Four of my high school classmates were killed, including, as I said, the son of my guy who was my Sunday school teacher for nine years. And I also knew, because I had to carry the stuff around, that not everything the government was claiming about the progress on the battlefield was true, and it’s kind of a crazy burden for a kid my age. I felt guilty I wasn’t there, and it felt futile to go. It was an awful feeling.

Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so.

And actually now having had the advantage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and being able to look at some of the records of what the apartheid government was doing, the thing that is surprising to me is why so many of us survived. I mean, how is it that they did not assassinate more of us?

I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think — I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn’t know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn’t know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn’t know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense — this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.

I stopped being a teacher when the South African Government introduced a deliberately inferior education for blacks called Bantu education, and I felt I wasn’t ready to collaborate with this apology for an educational system. Our children, the 1976 kids who revolted against apartheid in Soweto, called it “gutter education,” and it was gutter education. I left teaching. Of course, I didn’t have too many option, and mercifully, the Bishop of Johannesburg at that time accepted me for training for the priesthood. So I came to the priesthood, as it were, by default.

Just look at a Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela, and you’ll see that one of the outstanding characteristics of each one of these is how they have poured themselves out prodigally on behalf of others, of their being so utterly selfless.

One moment, Nelson Mandela is in jail, and the next moment, he is walking, a free man. One moment, we are shackled as the oppressed of apartheid; the next, we are voting for the very first time. I was 63 when I voted for the first time in my life in the country of my birth. Nelson Mandela was 76 years of age. But it happened, it happened. It happened partly because the international community supported us. People prayed for us. People demonstrated on our behalf, especially young people. Students at universities and college campuses used to sit out in the baking sunshine to force their institutions to divest and the miracle happened. We became free because we were helped and we want to say a big “thank you” to the world. And, you can become free nonviolently.

Dream. Dream. Dream. Be like God, dream because God believes in you young people. Most of God’s best collaborators and partners have been young people. Joseph, David, Jeremiah, St. Francis. They are young, young, young. And in many ways Jesus was young. Many of those who have been God’s best works — fellow workers have been young. And don’t allow oldies to fill you with their cynicism and disillusionment. Dream. Dream that this world can become better as you do dream, in fact. I mean, when these young people go off and work as Peace Corps and other volunteering groups in poverty stricken places where they don’t get any better headlines for dreaming the good things. Dream. Dream. Dream. Dream that this can be a world without poverty. Dream that this can be a world without war. Dream that this is a world that will recognize that every human being matters.