Gov. Mario Cuomo loves words and he wrote many of them for Newsday during his career. We have selected six commentary pieces published between 1983 to 2009, insightful for the entry each gives to his political philosophy.

Opinion

From the archive: Mario Cuomo's essays and speeches

This op-ed by former New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo was originally published in Newsday on January 20, 2009. 
On Feb. 12, three weeks into the administration of our 44th president, Barack Obama, America will mark the 200th birthday of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln - considered by most historians to be our greatest president ever. 
The competition by presidents and presidential candidates to claim the mantle of Lincoln in ways big and small has come to embrace all political faiths. Obama is no exception. He will be the first president to be sworn in on the same Bible used by Lincoln in 1861, having arrived in Washington from Philadelphia by train as Lincoln had, and he has mentioned several times that he has been studying Lincoln's speeches for help in preparing his own inaugural address. 
Obama's inauguration today will start what will be the most challenge-ridden presidential term since Lincoln's. Only history will tell us how it compares with Lincoln's, but there are already apparent similarities and differences in their personalities, positions and situations that indicate the kind of leadership we can expect from Obama. 
Obama, like Lincoln, has superb personal gifts: a brilliant analytical mind, riveting oratorical and writing abilities, and the capability to remain calm under fire. Both were born and raised in modest circumstances. Neither had significant executive experience before becoming president, and both were considered underdogs at the outset of their campaigns. 
Obama, like Lincoln, rejects rigid ideology in policymaking, relying instead on common sense, benign pragmatism, and an overarching grand concept designed to inspire and unify us. Lincoln grasped that single most important idea that would sustain and provoke him for the rest of his days: the Declaration of Independence's achievable goal of equality and opportunity. 
To Lincoln - and now to Obama - this is not only a lofty dream or sweet poetry to soothe the soul by wrapping it in high aspiration. It was and is the attainable goal of flesh-and-blood humans who would have to find ways to provide fairly rewarded work, education, health care, security in our invalid or older years, and - most of all - equality of opportunity and the right to be treated with dignity. 
Lincoln respected the indispensable need for a market-system economy in achieving these goals, but he also realized that while the market is essential to a successful economy, it is not by itself sufficient to assure it. For that reason Lincoln urged that government be used aggressively to meet the needs the market economy failed to satisfy. 
Obama has demonstrated clearly that he, like Lincoln, will not hesitate to call for substantial governmental assistance in the effort to right the Ship of State in today's troubled waters. 
Obama also shares Lincoln's extraordinary vision. Lincoln looked beyond the superficial differences that God or history had imposed on us to see the essential truths that unite us. He sympathized vigorously with the cause of democracy in other lands, in Hungary and South America and Greece. He understood that a respect for individual dignity and the equality of all people was the essential foundation, not just for his American family, but for the whole human race. 
Lincoln knew, as Obama surely does, that we cannot end terror here, in the Middle East or anywhere in the world just by having the world's most powerful weapons and the best fighting force. We have to add to this force whatever is needed to provide the realistic hope for opportunity and dignity that quiets rage and produces peace here at home and across the globe. 
Because Obama shares much of Abraham Lincoln's personality and many of his fundamental beliefs, his leadership could give our nation the chance to live the American dream, an opportunity that Lincoln was denied by an assassin's bullet. 
But it could mean much more. While there are significant similarities between Obama and Lincoln, there's a vast and important difference between the circumstances faced by the two in their first term as president. 
Lincoln focused his 1861 inaugural address on the one issue that eventually dominated his political career - slavery in the United States and how it would affect the Union, as he had done in the famous debates with Stephen Douglas and his major address before the 1860 convention. 
In the first moments of his inaugural address, Lincoln dismissed the other issues facing him as creating neither excitement nor anxiety. 
Obama, on the other hand, has literally scores of daunting global issues to deal with, and his success or failure will have a worldwide impact. Today, when he places his left hand on that same Bible Lincoln used a century and a half ago, Obama will be sworn in as president and commander in chief of the dominant superpower in the world, a world that has more than 6 billion human beings, many of whom depend to one extent or another on the condition and actions of the nation Obama will lead. 
Never before has there been a nation with such tremendous influence on the entire planet - a planet infested with weapons of mass destruction possessed by dozens of nations, many of them hostile to one another, some already at war and others poised at the brink. 
Further menacing the planet is the inconvenient truth of global warming, terrorism, pandemics of various kinds, regular episodes of genocide, hunger threatening millions of human beings and now a badly wounded world economy, ailing in part because of a serious recession in the United States. 
One hundred forty-eight years of globalization with its benefits and its burdens make this a very different world from the one Lincoln lived and served in. 
Lincoln's failure would have left scarred the face of America, extending the cruel tragedy of slavery and perhaps fracturing the Union. His success helped keep the American dream alive. 
Obama's failure would heighten the threat of unprecedented global damage, but his success could help lead our great nation and this entire threatened world into a new period of enlightenment and progress. 
Obama's moment in history is a unique one. There has never been more to worry about, but neither has there ever been more to hope for. 
We should choose hope. 
Mario M. Cuomo was governor of New York from 1983 to 1995.

Barack Obama faces a unique moment in history

Inauguration2009 -- CROPPED

This op-ed originally appeared in Newsday on Aug. 28, 2005. 
For more than 20 years, some conservative clerics and politicians have bitterly criticized Catholic public officials for refusing to use their offices to "correct" the law of the land. They demand that Catholic officials make political decisions reflecting their religious belief that abortion is tantamount to murder and work to overturn Roe v. Wade and other laws that make abortion legal. 
Most of the targeted officials have been Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Gerry Ferraro and John Kerry. But now that Judge John G. Roberts Jr. - their candidate - has been nominated for the United States Supreme Court, the shoe is on the other political foot. 
Conservatives are outraged that another Catholic public official might be considered deserving of the same criticism. They demand that Roberts not be asked about personal beliefs, including religious ones, because it would amount to a "religious test" prohibited by the Constitution. 
They are clearly wrong. 
Article VI of the Constitution states two things: first, that all officials - judges as well as legislators- must take an oath swearing that they will support the Constitution as "the supreme law of the land," their personal beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding. It also states that no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any public office. 
Generally, the courts have interpreted this article to mean that no one shall be required to profess or deny a religious belief in order to be deemed qualified for public office. 
There are two long-standing rulings on this issue. 
In 1961, a Maryland law was found unconstitutional for demanding that believing in God was a qualification for application as a notary public. 
And in 1978, Tennessee overturned a law that said members of the clergy could not serve as public officials. 
No one is suggesting that being a Catholic or any kind of believer could by itself be a disqualification for a seat on the Supreme Court. Indeed, Roberts would be the fourth Catholic on the current court. 
The question about Roberts' beliefs in effect asks whether he would impose his own personal test, religious or otherwise, on his reading of the Constitution: 
Would he say he might ignore his oath to support the Constitution if faced with an overriding personal belief? 
Conservatives' arguments that this is a religious test are disingenuous. Their discomfort is caused by the fact that the question presents Roberts with a Hobson's choice. Either Roberts says he would ignore his oath to support the Constitution or insists he would put aside his personal beliefs and live up to his oath called for by the Constitution. 
It's already clear from Roberts' testimony at a previous confirmation hearing and his discussions with senators that he almost certainly would profess to put aside his personal beliefs rather than dishonor his oath or resign. But that would leave the conservative critics with a dilemma. Do they criticize Roberts as they did Kerry and the other Democrats? If they do, it would be politically embarrassing. If they don't, it would only add to the divisiveness created by attempts to force religious beliefs into law through political intimidation. 
Everyone involved should use this opportunity constructively, seeking to make religion the positive force in society that it should be, instead of another disruptive element in our fragmenting democracy. 
The Senate Judiciary Committee should ask Roberts whether he would ever place his personal beliefs - religious or otherwise - above his oath to support the Constitution. Roberts would answer in the negative, as has Justice Antonin Scalia, another devout Catholic. 
All sides should then acknowledge that there is no clear church teaching demanding that any public official - legislative or judicial - violate his or her solemn oath to support the Constitution. Indeed, Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen, urged that, whenever possible, conflict among law, faith and public duty should be avoided. That's not difficult here, if all sides try. 
In this pluralistic society, when we offer our religious principles as rules for others to live by, we should do so through persuasion and not coercion, by example and not just preachments. 
Mario M. Cuomo was governor of New York from 1983 to 1995.

Avoid conflict between law, faith and public duty

Cuomo: Avoid conflict between law, faith and duty

Roberts Cropped

This essay originally appeared in Newsday on Oct. 11, 1989. 
WHEN THE middle class and the rich finally figure out that the poor, who will be forever with us, are the work force of the 21st Century; that it is not just the poor people who will always be with us but drug addiction and the social disorientation felt even in the suburbs, then they will see that the misery of the poor is our misery. 
Now that we're not focused on the Cold War, we are free to look around at our society and ourselves. Drugs have shocked us into a new self-realization of the condition of this society. Even before drugs, the homeless came as a real shock. It wasn't just a matter of the compassion we felt when seeing the homeless, but a matter of ineffectuality. As with drugs, we could see, perhaps as never before in America, that our society had fundamental problems with which we seem unable to cope. 
At the same time, the middle class is just beginning to figure out that the rich are doing better than they ever did, while they themselves are stalled. Just as they are unsettled by the homeless, they are beginning to become unsettled about giveaways to the rich when the quality of their kids' schools is collapsing for lack of funds. 
They know that the top tax rate used to be 70 percent and now it is going to be 28 percent. They remember that when the first tax reform bill was announced, President Reagan was willing to settle for a top rate of 38 percent. What was so bad about leaving it at 38 percent? That's what the president of the rich wanted. 
It doesn't take a tax genius, just a school parent or someone who lives in an unsafe neighborhood, to realize that billions and billions of dollars that might be used for falling bridges and the drug war are going to end up in minks and Jaguars when the top rate drops from 38 percent to 28 percent. 
So the middle class is saying, "Wait a minute. We haven't gone anywhere in the last 12 years. The guys above us are doing great, the people beneath us, well, they may not be working hard enough, but we also haven't done so hot. And with the plague of drugs and everyone being mugged who is not rich enough to move to an island somewhere, we're threatened." 
Reagan spent eight years telling us that the homeless, whose numbers his policies helped increase, chose to live on the streets. He told us there was no reason to be poor. Look at all those want-ads in the newspaper, he told us. And let's face it, he added, we already put money into curing poverty and it didn't work. So, why try again? 
He told the middle class they had no moral obligation to the poor and, in any case, they'd be dummies to waste their money on the terminally indolent. 
George Bush campaigned in that way, but it was never his instinct. As soon as the campaign was over, his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, started pouring out volumes of Democratic poetry. 
The real meaning of George Bush's rhetoric has not been properly appreciated: He has rejected Reagan! His call for a kinder and gentler America is a response to the disturbed sensibility of the middle class. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he said there are many poor people and minorities who must be admitted to the circle of opportunity. It's not trees that pollute, it's acid rain! Drugs are a federal problem. Education is deteriorating. In an economy where most women have to work, there is need for day care. 
Having never admitted to any of these realities made Reagan stronger politically. His rhetoric could never be tested by the resources he put up to deal with the needs he admitted. 
Politically speaking, I think the rejection of Reagan will prove to be Bush's mistake. He's admitted the needs, but figures he can forget the rest, or blame the Democrats for breaking Gramm-Rudman to pay for social programs. But he can't get away with that now, not after coming up with $166 billion to bail out the savings-and-loan industry. If he can pay for that, he can pay for this. 
For the moment, we seem to be able to get by with a kind of charming acquiescence in our leadership. The smiling face of good fortune, like Dan Quayle, has been Bush's companion so far. Without even flexing a military muscle, we have seen Poland turn democratic and capitalist. Bush has not yet had any real occasion to take a position that has put him on the wrong side of the polls. 
But that will change when it becomes clear that truly coping with our interdependent problems at home requires aggressive leadership and money. What happens then? 
Bush has declared war but can't pay for the troops. Would Winston Churchill declare war against the Nazis and then call the accountants to see if he could afford it? You can't do that. 
At some point, you have to be realistic and say, "Look, what we need here is revenues. I'm on the line; we're raising taxes." If you don't say that - and yes, I am willing to say that - you can't get away with the kinder-and-gentler rhetoric. 
You can't be fooled by the Mondale experience and think that anybody who stands up now and tells the American people the truth about taxes is going to lose. It's not true. 
But you can't raise taxes the old way. 
First, the need has to be absolutely apparent. I think drugs, crime and AIDS have taken care of that. 
Second, you cannot say "taxes" in the abstract. That means everybody, Cuomo, the corporation, the taxicab driver. That's silly. You have to say which tax and on whom. That immediately identifies who will bear the burden. Everybody else is off the hook, and they're with you. 
If you say you are going to tax 12 percent of the people, the other 88 percent will be with you. Let's ask why the top tax rate should be 28 percent, instead of 34 percent, or even the 38 percent Reagan initially sought? Revenues from that kind of adjustment would solve much of our budget problem. Let's ask - why not put a 1 percent surcharge on income tax nationally to generate $10 billion to fight crime? 
Thirdly, and unfortunately, I think you have to identify the specific purpose of the tax. We've lost the opportunity in the American political process to say, "I - the governor, the state Legislature, the Congress - am going to tax you. I'll spend it well." Those in government must show how the revenues are going to be spent: on infrastructure, education, on drugs. 
The Reagan message was seductive. He argued, "You can have all your money back in tax cuts; I'll give you the strongest defense you ever had, $750 billion more than before, and I'll still balance the budget." It's called nirvana. Heaven on Earth. A cornucopia of endless fruits and abundance stimulated by tax cuts. 
Its real name was Fantasy. Reagan's worst sin, though, was that this fantasy seduced the nation into a state of indifference. Now, however, there is an awakening. The key word here is interdependence. What affects one of us affects all of us, in our own society and globally, whether we are talking about the underclass or the environment. 
This new self-realization of interdependence is generally unsettling to the middle class. It creates a certain anguish; it shakes people and rouses them from the complacency of the Reagan years. Once people get into the mood of looking around and trying to make things right again, once they accept that things are not right, then you can start talking to them about how to straighten out the house. The American electorate is very close to that mood now. 
Mario M. Cuomo&nbsp;was governor of New York from 1983 to 1995.

How will George Bush pay for the government he wants?

Cuomo: How will Bush pay for the government he wants?

Bush Reagan

This commentary originally appeared in Newsday on May 20, 1979. 
I am concerned that some of New York’s intelligentsia have apparently accepted the proposition that “shrinkage” is an inevitable — even desirable — approach to New York’s future. 
No one who has lived in this great city over the past 10 years could fail to have seen shrinkage — the decline in the city’s population — at work. We have been told that it was not a consequence of deliberate municipal policy. But we have watched the South Bronx burn — square miles of habitation destroyed. We have seen Bushwick and Bed-Stuy decay until they look like a holocaust has passed through them, with the empty eyes of windows without glass staring out at streets without people. 
Lower middle-class communities in Far Rockaway and South Jamaica have been replaced by desolation and the strained hopes of communities on the skids. 
The Census Bureau estimates that the city may have lost nearly half a million people since 1970. 
Deliberate or not, this process of reduction — whatever it is called — poses at least two question: first, whether the phenomenon, for all its sadness, contains any redeeming elements, and second, whether it ought to be encouraged. 
I believe “shrinkage” is a siren song that whispers: “We can get rid of our problems.” In some there is a deeper voice saying that our “problems” are created by the poor rabble f our city, who happen, accidentally, to be black and Hispanic for the most part. Triage is the process, not of uplifting them, but of making them go away. 
It is a vain hope that our problems will emigrate. It is an old hope, too, like that which motivated the signs, “No Irish Need Apply.” And those that haunted the Italians and the Jews as they made their adjustments to hostilities in our economy and society. 
Obviously, I do not mean to say that everyone who predicts of believes in shrinkage is a bigot. But these same urges, I think, motivate, for some, the desire to depopulate today. 
The desire to get rid of our problem poor has often been revealed as a bias against manufacturing industry, which attracts them, and for service and professional forms of economy — nice, middle-class, you know. This works its way slowly into policy and soon the wish becomes reality. 
The vision is of a grand middle-class city of respectable city with a socially and economically homogenous population. 
The tale can be told like this: 
Once upon a time in a great city, many good government experts and the elite business leadership of the city had toiled to make a vision of the city come true. 
Let’s call the city, “New York.” 
Many were jealous of the style and character of the great capital cities of the western world, like Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Rome and London. Since the mid-19th Century, they had believed that the beauty and order of these cities should be imitated in New York City. 
Instead, New York City was a confused jumble of factories, lofts, pushcarts, banks, slaughter houses, elegant skyscrapers, brokerage houses, smoke-belching cracker factories and delicate, federal-style buildings. A grubby proletariat filed into subways and trolley cars, and they were everywhere. 
What a great city like New York needed was an economy based on gentlemanly pursuits, such as banking, finance, lawyering, accounting, etc. 
The economic leadership was not very successful for a long time. As New York City’s industrial power grew, so did its population, and right through the 1940s, New York’s manufacturing base also grew. Its wealth was a magnet for the poor and they came by the millions. 
But then a formidable coalition formed: experts and financiers, real estate interests and good government people. We taxed the factories and the merchant’s industries more heavily than we taxed other activity. We zoned against them. We overregulated them and under protected them. We gave them short shrift and they understood they were not very welcome in New York City. 
These manufactures also learned there were places all over the country which were begging these factories to come to them. They began to leave New York, and at first these departures were welcomed. 
As more and more left, a new theory took over to explain it: “New York City was the vanguard of a new kind of economy and a kind of society called the Service Economy and Society. It was based on things like government, finance, banking, publishing, communications, legal and economic expertise — very much like its European older sisters. 
New York City continued to lose factory jobs throughout the ‘50s. In the ‘60s the unemployment wasn’t noticed because government was soaking up most of the marginal increase in unemployment. 
In 1969, the service economy for the first time exceeded the factory economy. 
But in 1969, our city went into a recession. It has been receding every year since. 
The dimensions of this decline can be described in the following way: Based on the normal growth that might have been expected for New York, if it maintained only the national rates of growth, the actual effects on the period were: 900,000 people (a population the size of Baltimore), mostly skilled and middle-class, gone; 800,000 jobs (more jobs than in the State of Kansas) — mostly in manufacture — lost. We lost 14,000 business establishments. 
It was a catastrophe. New York City was experiencing unplanned shrinkage. It was becoming much less diversified in its economy. It was growing more dependent on fewer industries — service industries, including government. These industries were not capable of producing as much in taxes as did the old mix of manufacturing and services. 
By 1975, New York City was in terrible trouble; it was bankrupt and was saved only by the timely intervention of the state, under Hugh Carey’s leadership, and a federal loan. 
What had happened? 
By getting rid of its factories, the city shed more than just its leading tax producers. The city was at the same time getting rid of its greatest immigrant adaptation machine. But America had shut its immigration doors in the 1920s. So there seemed to be adequate reason to believe that New York City would not have to deal with such a wave again. 
“Out with the factories!” was the cry. But, after they were well on their way out, a new wave of immigrants di hit the city. Blacks, Puerto Ricans and South Americans. Moved by the post-World War II mechanization of agriculture, especially in the American south, they came to New York City looking, like other immigrants, for opportunities to work and grow. 
They were, like other immigrants, mostly unskilled. But unlike previous immigrants to New York they faced a situation where factory jobs were leaving and the only open jobs were for white collars. 
Many wound up on public assistance. Their children flooded the public schools, where were not able to handle a wave of depressed immigrant youngsters from underemployed and demoralized families. Also, the schools had to train them for white collar jobs and in one leap, lift them into the middle-class in a single generation. 
The public schools broke down under the strain of so great a burden. Drug abuse became a hopeless escape from hopelessness. Crime increased and welfare, now growing by the positive feedback of a sick system, also produced the spreading despair that can be seen in the South Bronx, Bushwick, along the Grand Concourse and in South Queens. 
When the economic decay finally undermined the city’s financial base in 1975, government could not take up the slack. It, too, was depressed and had started laying people off. 
And that’s about where it is today. New York appears to be stabilizing. However, as several people have pointed out, it is a midtown Manhattan real estate flurry that dazzles us: the outer boroughs are still suffering decline. And the city is borrowing from the future on its capital budget and it will have to pay the price of neglect. 
I write of the importance of primary industry and factory work, not to denigrate the importance of service industries. I believe respectfully that the city’s fathers, from the beginning, made the mistake of seeing a competition between different types of industry. 
That is unhealthy. We need, rather, a balance of both. We are a mixed bag in New York City: educated and uneducated, rich and poor, smart and not-so-smart, strong and weak, resourceful and confused, good and bad — a true cosmopolitan city. We need jobs that will be attractive to all peoples who come to New York. 
This is a port city with an open door. It should have a variety of industry, to have a job for everyone. That’s the kind of city it always has been — when it has been closer to its best. 
Mario M. Cuomo of Holliswood is secretary of state of New York. This article is adapted from a speech to the New York State Bankers Association.

New York needs both rich and poor to thrive

Opinion: NY needs both rich and poor to thrive

Mario Cuomo 1977 / mg

This excerpt from Mario Cuomo's commencement address at Queens College was printed in Newsday on June 9, 1983. 
In writing [this address], I have tried to keep in mind the experience of the governor of Vermont who had the fortune — or misfortune’ to speak at the same commencement at which mark Twain received an honorary degree. 
On a hot June afternoon, the governor went on, and on, and on, and Twain took off his mortarboard hat and went to sleep. 
Finally, overcome by the hot air — both his own and nature’s — the governor concluded and, in retaking his chair, inadvertently sat on Twain’s hat. 
With that, Twain stood, and in a voice loud enough for all to hear, said, “Governor, that wasn’t necessary — I could have told you my hat wouldn’t fit before you tried it on.” 
Let me be honest with you about my own experience with commencement addresses. 
I’ve sat through dozens — although thankfully I have yet to sit on anybody else’s hat — but I can’t recall a single word or phrase from any one of those informed, inspirational and seemingly interminable addresses. Despite that, however, I think now, in looking back, that the president of my alma mater, St. John’s University, may have hit the mark when he once told me, “Having a commencement speaker serves the same purpose as the body at a Irish wake. It’s essential for the part, but you don’t expect it so say very much.” He could have added: “Nor do you want it to.” 
Others wiser and more learned than I have decided there continues to be virtue in this tradition. So I will speak to you, but I will try not do delay you too long. 
In view of the office I hold, I am expected, no doubt, to talk about politics and government — subjects that leave most people cold. 
I’m used to that reaction. In fact, in the house I was raised in hear in Queens, a career in politics was considered more unthinkable than uninteresting. 
My mother and father were immigrants, hard-working, illiterate people driven here by lack of opportunity. They struggled like most immigrants before and since, scrimping, sacrificing, saving. 
And they dreamed the immigrants’ dream: that through their faith and perseverance they could one day make it possible for their children to grasp the full promise of America — education, a profession, status, success. I, like many of the others here today, was one of those children. 
Raised up by my parent’s sacrifices, infused by their belief in America, clothed and fed and educate with the savings that — somehow — they managed to scrape together, I lived out their hopes. College. Law school. A family. A house. A successful law practice. My name in the newspapers. Even a book. 
And then, in 1975, I decided to go into politics. My father couldn’t understand. At first, he was silent. He’d seen other men do strange things when they passed 40 and, I think he hoped politics was a phase I’d go through quickly. 
When I persisted, he asked, “But why, Mario?” 
“Because, Pa,” I said, “I’ve figured that this system has been good to us and I want to give something back. Besides, I want the best for my kids, and politics and government affect them, so I’m going into politics.” 
“But, Mario,” my father replied, “all your life you’ve been honest.” 
I’m afraid a lot of Americans still feel that way. If they don’t see politics as necessarily dishonest, then they often believe it is ineffective or useless. 
Perhaps this would be easier to accept if you and I could resign ourselves to the believe that we — as individuals — don’t really make a difference because, after all, one vote and one life can’t really change things. 
That would be easier, I suppose, than facing the responsibility we bear for one another. 
But priests, rabbis, ministers, professors preach compassion at us. The voice of individual conscience keeps telling us we must care. Finally, the system of government we live under demands we care enough to get involved. Our system rewards involvement and punishes aloofness. 
It gives the governed the chance to insist on intelligent, reasonable, sensible polices form their government, allow them to dismiss corrupt officials, to require that order be reconciled with justice, stability with opportunity, progress with compassion. 
Americans of every generation have kept faith with the principle that ordinary people, born without high pedigree or great privilege, could govern themselves and give to each man and woman among us a reasonable measure of freedom, enjoyment, self-fulfillment. 
But unless there is a new generation willing to take on the burdens of self-government, then the very rich will get richer, the poor will become fixed in their desperation, violence will increase, and the purpose of government will be reduced to maintaining order, no matter the cost in freedom, in justice, in lives. 
You must be ready to step outside whatever niche you envision for yourselves and understand that awful range of moral, economic and political judgments that beset New York and the nation. 
You must educate yourselves to those choices — and then you must help the system to make them. 
Mario Cuomo is governor of New York. This article is excerpted from his commencement address at Queens College.

As you graduate, remember the responsibility of self-government

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MARIO Cuomo cropped - generic

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