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Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, its foibles; its phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths. Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
对我来说，背叛时代意味着揭露它的自负、缺点和伪善的道德信条；它意味着揭露时代的秘密，直面更为残酷的事实。每个时代都有许多道德盲点。我们也许看不到，但我们的下一代却能看到。奴隶制就是一个盲点，只有为那个时代做出伟大贡献的人们才会如此称呼它，因为他们了解这种制度的荒唐和野蛮。本·富兰克林成为宾夕法尼亚废除奴隶制委员会主席时就称其为奴隶制。
Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age. May 17, 1954, it says here, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
种族隔离，这是另一个盲点。现在美国已经意识到了这一点，但却是从全国的民权运动开始背叛那个时代的。50年前，美国最高法院背叛了时代。1954年5月17日，布朗诉求教育委员会案胜诉，揭穿了“隔离但平等”这一谎言。阿门。
Fast forward 50 years.--May 17, 2004. What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? What's worth spending your post-Penn lives trying to do or undo? It might be something simple. It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it? Each of you will probably have your own answer, but for me that is it. And for me the proving ground has been Africa.
50年很快就过去了。今天——2004年5月17日，我们要背叛哪些思想呢？我们对自己说了什么谎呢？我们这个时代的盲点是什么？离开宾夕法尼亚大学后，什么值得去做什么不值得去做？答案也许非常简单，就像我们在内心深处拒绝相信每一个生命都有相同的价值一样简单。是我说的那样吗？是那样吗？你们每个人也许都将会有自己的答案，但对我来说确实是这样的。非洲就是最好的证明。
