WEBVTT

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"Even in purely nonreligious terms,

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homosexuality represents
a misuse of the sexual faculty.

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It is a pathetic little second-rate
substitute for reality --

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a pitiable flight from life.

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As such, it deserves no compassion,

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it deserves no treatment
as minority martyrdom,

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and it deserves not to be deemed
anything but a pernicious sickness."

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That's from "Time" magazine in 1966,
when I was three years old.

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And last year, the president
of the United States

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came out in favor of gay marriage.

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(Applause)

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And my question is:

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How did we get from there to here?

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How did an illness become an identity?

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When I was perhaps six years old,

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I went to a shoe store
with my mother and my brother.

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And at the end of buying our shoes,

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the salesman said to us that we could
each have a balloon to take home.

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My brother wanted a red balloon,

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and I wanted a pink balloon.

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My mother said that she thought
I'd really rather have a blue balloon.

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(Laughter)

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But I said that I definitely
wanted the pink one.

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And she reminded me
that my favorite color was blue.

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The fact that my favorite color
now is blue, but I'm still gay --

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(Laughter)

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is evidence of both my mother's influence

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and its limits.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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When I was little, my mother used to say,

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"The love you have for your children
is like no other feeling in the world.

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And until you have children,
you don't know what it's like."

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And when I was little, I took it
as the greatest compliment in the world

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that she would say that
about parenting my brother and me.

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And when I was an adolescent,
I thought, "But I'm gay,

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and so I probably can't have a family."

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And when she said it, it made me anxious.

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And after I came out of the closet,

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when she continued to say it,
it made me furious.

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I said, "I'm gay. That's not
the direction that I'm headed in.

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And I want you to stop saying that."

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About 20 years ago,

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I was asked by my editors
at the "New York Times Magazine"

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to write a piece about Deaf culture.

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And I was rather taken aback.

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I had thought of deafness
entirely as an illness:

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those poor people, they couldn't hear,

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they lacked hearing,
and what could we do for them?

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And then I went out into the Deaf world.

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I went to Deaf clubs.

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I saw performances of Deaf theater
and of Deaf poetry.

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I even went to the Miss Deaf America
contest in Nashville, Tennessee,

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where people complained
about that slurry Southern signing.

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(Laughter)

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And as I plunged deeper and deeper
into the Deaf world,

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I became convinced
that Deafness was a culture

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and that the people
in the Deaf world who said,

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"We don't lack hearing;
we have membership in a culture,"

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were saying something that was viable.

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It wasn't my culture,

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and I didn't particularly
want to rush off and join it,

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but I appreciated that it was a culture

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and that for the people
who were members of it,

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it felt as valuable as Latino culture
or gay culture or Jewish culture.

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It felt as valid, perhaps,
even as American culture.

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Then a friend of a friend of mine
had a daughter who was a dwarf.

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And when her daughter was born,

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she suddenly found herself
confronting questions

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that now began to seem
quite resonant to me.

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She was facing the question
of what to do with this child.

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Should she say, "You're just like
everyone else but a little bit shorter?"

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Or should she try to construct
some kind of dwarf identity,

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get involved in
the Little People of America,

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become aware of what was
happening for dwarfs?

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And I suddenly thought,

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"Most deaf children are born
to hearing parents.

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Those hearing parents
tend to try to cure them.

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Those deaf people discover community
somehow in adolescence.

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Most gay people
are born to straight parents.

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Those straight parents
often want them to function

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in what they think of
as the mainstream world,

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and those gay people
have to discover identity later on.

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And here was this friend of mine,

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looking at these questions of identity
with her dwarf daughter.

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And I thought, "There it is again:

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a family that perceives
itself to be normal

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with a child who seems
to be extraordinary."

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And I hatched the idea that there are
really two kinds of identity.

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There are vertical identities,

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which are passed down generationally
from parent to child.

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Those are things like ethnicity,

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frequently nationality,
language, often religion.

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Those are things you have in common
with your parents and with your children.

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And while some of them can be difficult,

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there's no attempt to cure them.

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You can argue that it's harder
in the United States --

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our current presidency notwithstanding --

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to be a person of color.

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And yet, we have nobody
who is trying to ensure

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that the next generation of children
born to African-Americans and Asians

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come out with creamy skin and yellow hair.

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There are these other identities
which you have to learn from a peer group,

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and I call them "horizontal identities,"

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because the peer group
is the horizontal experience.

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These are identities
that are alien to your parents

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and that you have to discover
when you get to see them in peers.

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And those identities,
those horizontal identities,

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people have almost always tried to cure.

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And I wanted to look
at what the process is

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through which people
who have those identities

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come to a good relationship with them.

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And it seemed to me that there were
three levels of acceptance

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that needed to take place.

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There's self-acceptance, there's family
acceptance, and there's social acceptance.

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And they don't always coincide.

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And a lot of the time, people who have
these conditions are very angry,

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because they feel as though
their parents don't love them,

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when what actually has happened
is that their parents don't accept them.

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Love is something that,
ideally, is there unconditionally

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throughout the relationship
between a parent and a child.

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But acceptance
is something that takes time.

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It always takes time.

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One of the dwarfs I got to know
was a guy named Clinton Brown.

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When he was born, he was diagnosed
with diastrophic dwarfism,

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a very disabling condition,

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and his parents were told
that he would never walk,

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he would never talk,

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he would have no intellectual capacity,

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and he would probably
not even recognize them.

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And it was suggested to them
that they leave him at the hospital

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so that he could die there quietly.

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His mother said she wasn't going to do it,

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and she took her son home.

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And even though she didn't have a lot
of educational or financial advantages,

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she found the best doctor in the country
for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism,

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and she got Clinton enrolled with him.

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And in the course of his childhood,

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he had 30 major surgical procedures.

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And he spent all this time
stuck in the hospital

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while he was having those procedures,

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as a result of which, he now can walk.

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While he was there, they sent tutors
around to help him with his schoolwork,

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and he worked very hard,
because there was nothing else to do.

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He ended up achieving at a level

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that had never before been contemplated
by any member of his family.

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He was the first one in his family,
in fact, to go to college,

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where he lived on campus
and drove a specially fitted car

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that accommodated his unusual body.

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And his mother told me the story
of coming home one day --

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and he went to college nearby --

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and she said, "I saw that car,
which you can always recognize,

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in the parking lot of a bar," she said.

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(Laughter)

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"And I thought to myself,

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'They're six feet tall,
he's three feet tall.

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Two beers for them
is four beers for him.'"

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She said, "I knew I couldn't
go in there and interrupt him,

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but I went home, and I left him
eight messages on his cell phone."

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She said, "And then I thought,

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if someone had said to me,
when he was born,

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that my future worry would be
that he'd go drinking and driving

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with his college buddies ..."

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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And I said to her,

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"What do you think you did
that helped him to emerge

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as this charming, accomplished,
wonderful person?"

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And she said, "What did I do?

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I loved him, that's all.

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Clinton just always had that light in him.

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And his father and I were lucky enough
to be the first to see it there."

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I'm going to quote
from another magazine of the '60s.

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This one is from 1968 --

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"The Atlantic Monthly,"
voice of liberal America --

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written by an important bioethicist.

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He said, "There is no
reason to feel guilty

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about putting a Down's
syndrome child away,

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whether it is 'put away' in the sense
of hidden in a sanitarium

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or in a more responsible, lethal sense.

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It is sad, yes. Dreadful.

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But it carries no guilt.

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True guilt arises only
from an offense against a person,

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and a Down's is not a person."

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There's been a lot of ink given
to the enormous progress that we've made

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in the treatment of gay people.

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The fact that our attitude has changed
is in the headlines every day.

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But we forget how we used to see people
who had other differences,

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how we used to see people
who were disabled,

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how inhuman we held people to be.

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And the change that's been
accomplished there,

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which is almost equally radical,

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is one that we pay
not very much attention to.

NOTE Paragraph

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One of the families I interviewed,
Tom and Karen Robards,

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were taken aback when,
as young and successful New Yorkers,

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their first child was diagnosed
with Down syndrome.

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They thought the educational opportunities
for him were not what they should be,

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and so they decided
they would build a little center --

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two classrooms that they started
with a few other parents --

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to educate kids with DS.

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And over the years, that center grew
into something called the Cooke Center,

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where there are now thousands
upon thousands of children

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with intellectual disabilities

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who are being taught.

NOTE Paragraph

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In the time since that "Atlantic
Monthly" story ran,

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the life expectancy for people
with Down syndrome has tripled.

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The experience of Down syndrome
people includes those who are actors,

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those who are writers, some who are able
to live fully independently in adulthood.

NOTE Paragraph

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The Robards had a lot to do with that.

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And I said, "Do you regret it?

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Do you wish your child
didn't have Down syndrome?

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Do you wish you'd never heard of it?"

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And interestingly, his father said,

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"Well, for David, our son, I regret it,

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because for David,
it's a difficult way to be in the world,

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and I'd like to give David an easier life.

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But I think if we lost
everyone with Down syndrome,

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it would be a catastrophic loss."

NOTE Paragraph

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And Karen Robards
said to me, "I'm with Tom.

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For David, I would cure it in an instant,
to give him an easier life.

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But speaking for myself --

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well, I would never have believed
23 years ago when he was born

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that I could come to such a point.

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Speaking for myself, it's made me
so much better and so much kinder

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and so much more purposeful in my whole
life that, speaking for myself,

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I wouldn't give it up
for anything in the world."

NOTE Paragraph

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We live at a point when social acceptance
for these and many other conditions

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is on the up and up.

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And yet we also live at the moment

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when our ability to eliminate
those conditions

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has reached a height
we never imagined before.

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Most deaf infants
born in the United States now

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will receive cochlear implants,

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which are put into the brain
and connected to a receiver,

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and which allow them to acquire
a facsimile of hearing

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and to use oral speech.

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A compound that has been tested
in mice, BMN-111,

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is useful in preventing
the action of the achondroplasia gene.

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Achondroplasia is the most common
form of dwarfism,

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and mice who have been given
that substance

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and who have the achondroplasia gene

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grow to full size.

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Testing in humans is around the corner.

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There are blood tests
which are making progress

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that would pick up Down syndrome
more clearly and earlier in pregnancies

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than ever before,

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making it easier and easier for people
to eliminate those pregnancies,

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or to terminate them.

NOTE Paragraph

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So we have both social progress
and medical progress.

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And I believe in both of them.

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I believe the social progress is fantastic
and meaningful and wonderful,

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and I think the same thing
about the medical progress.

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But I think it's a tragedy
when one of them doesn't see the other.

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And when I see the way
they're intersecting

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in conditions like the three
I've just described,

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I sometimes think it's like
those moments in grand opera

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when the hero realizes
he loves the heroine

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at the exact moment
that she lies expiring on a divan.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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We have to think about how we feel
about cures altogether.

00:13:28.900 --> 00:13:31.712
And a lot of the time
the question of parenthood is:

00:13:31.736 --> 00:13:33.487
What do we validate in our children,

00:13:33.511 --> 00:13:35.316
and what do we cure in them?

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:35.340 --> 00:13:39.487
Jim Sinclair, a prominent
autism activist, said,

00:13:39.511 --> 00:13:44.088
"When parents say, 'I wish
my child did not have autism,'

00:13:44.112 --> 00:13:48.923
what they're really saying is,
'I wish the child I have did not exist

00:13:48.947 --> 00:13:52.299
and I had a different,
nonautistic child instead.'

00:13:52.858 --> 00:13:57.964
Read that again. This is what we hear
when you mourn over our existence.

00:13:57.988 --> 00:14:01.013
This is what we hear
when you pray for a cure:

00:14:01.037 --> 00:14:05.439
that your fondest wish for us
is that someday we will cease to be,

00:14:05.463 --> 00:14:10.082
and strangers you can love
will move in behind our faces."

00:14:11.241 --> 00:14:13.710
It's a very extreme point of view,

00:14:13.734 --> 00:14:18.047
but it points to the reality
that people engage with the life they have

00:14:18.071 --> 00:14:22.612
and they don't want to be cured
or changed or eliminated.

00:14:22.636 --> 00:14:25.698
They want to be whoever it is
that they've come to be.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:26.245 --> 00:14:29.856
One of the families
I interviewed for this project

00:14:29.880 --> 00:14:31.607
was the family of Dylan Klebold,

00:14:31.631 --> 00:14:35.016
who was one of the perpetrators
of the Columbine massacre.

00:14:35.040 --> 00:14:37.681
It took a long time
to persuade them to talk to me,

00:14:37.705 --> 00:14:40.329
and once they agreed,
they were so full of their story

00:14:40.353 --> 00:14:42.049
that they couldn't stop telling it,

00:14:42.073 --> 00:14:44.872
and the first weekend I spent
with them, the first of many,

00:14:44.896 --> 00:14:47.882
I recorded more than 20 hours
of conversation.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:47.906 --> 00:14:49.928
And on Sunday night,
we were all exhausted.

00:14:49.952 --> 00:14:53.192
We were sitting in the kitchen.
Sue Klebold was fixing dinner.

00:14:53.216 --> 00:14:55.866
And I said, "If Dylan were here now,

00:14:55.890 --> 00:14:58.537
do you have a sense
of what you'd want to ask him?"

00:14:58.561 --> 00:15:00.765
And his father said, "I sure do.

00:15:00.789 --> 00:15:03.634
I'd want to ask him what the hell
he thought he was doing."

00:15:04.068 --> 00:15:07.326
And Sue looked at the floor,
and she thought for a minute.

00:15:08.286 --> 00:15:10.631
And then she looked back up and said,

00:15:10.655 --> 00:15:14.288
"I would ask him to forgive me
for being his mother

00:15:14.312 --> 00:15:17.393
and never knowing
what was going on inside his head."

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:18.586 --> 00:15:21.531
When I had dinner with her
a couple of years later --

00:15:21.555 --> 00:15:23.768
one of many dinners
that we had together --

00:15:23.792 --> 00:15:26.648
she said, "You know,
when it first happened,

00:15:26.672 --> 00:15:30.731
I used to wish that I had never married,
that I had never had children.

00:15:30.755 --> 00:15:34.182
If I hadn't gone to Ohio State
and crossed paths with Tom,

00:15:34.206 --> 00:15:35.903
this child wouldn't have existed,

00:15:35.927 --> 00:15:38.135
and this terrible thing
wouldn't have happened.

00:15:38.159 --> 00:15:42.188
But I've come to feel that I love
the children I had so much

00:15:42.212 --> 00:15:44.919
that I don't want to imagine
a life without them.

00:15:45.563 --> 00:15:48.410
I recognize the pain
they caused to others,

00:15:48.434 --> 00:15:50.548
for which there can be no forgiveness,

00:15:50.572 --> 00:15:54.131
but the pain they caused
to me, there is," she said.

00:15:54.155 --> 00:15:57.743
"So while I recognize that
it would have been better for the world

00:15:57.767 --> 00:16:00.313
if Dylan had never been born,

00:16:00.337 --> 00:16:04.532
I've decided that it would not
have been better for me."

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:06.420 --> 00:16:07.938
I thought it was surprising

00:16:07.962 --> 00:16:10.614
how all of these families
had all of these children

00:16:10.638 --> 00:16:12.104
with all of these problems,

00:16:12.128 --> 00:16:15.180
problems that they mostly
would have done anything to avoid,

00:16:15.204 --> 00:16:19.094
and that they had all found so much
meaning in that experience of parenting.

00:16:19.118 --> 00:16:22.241
And then I thought,
all of us who have children

00:16:22.265 --> 00:16:25.176
love the children we have,
with their flaws.

00:16:25.200 --> 00:16:29.129
If some glorious angel suddenly descended
through my living-room ceiling

00:16:29.153 --> 00:16:31.355
and offered to take away
the children I have

00:16:31.379 --> 00:16:33.708
and give me other, better children --

00:16:33.732 --> 00:16:37.178
more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter --

00:16:37.202 --> 00:16:38.411
(Laughter)

00:16:38.435 --> 00:16:43.029
I would cling to the children I have
and pray away that atrocious spectacle.

00:16:43.053 --> 00:16:44.422
And ultimately,

00:16:44.446 --> 00:16:48.931
I feel that in the same way that we test
flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno

00:16:48.955 --> 00:16:53.140
to ensure they won't catch fire
when our child reaches across the stove,

00:16:53.164 --> 00:16:57.177
so these stories of families
negotiating these extreme differences

00:16:57.201 --> 00:16:59.864
reflect on the universal
experience of parenting,

00:16:59.888 --> 00:17:04.408
which is always that sometimes,
you look at your child, and you think,

00:17:04.432 --> 00:17:06.368
"Where did you come from?"

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:06.392 --> 00:17:08.916
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:08.940 --> 00:17:13.653
It turns out that while each of these
individual differences is siloed --

00:17:13.677 --> 00:17:16.462
there are only so many families
dealing with schizophrenia,

00:17:16.486 --> 00:17:19.084
only so many families
of children who are transgender,

00:17:19.108 --> 00:17:20.970
only so many families of prodigies --

00:17:20.994 --> 00:17:23.483
who also face similar
challenges in many ways --

00:17:23.507 --> 00:17:26.354
there are only so many families
in each of those categories.

00:17:26.378 --> 00:17:27.613
But if you start to think

00:17:27.637 --> 00:17:31.145
that the experience of negotiating
difference within your family

00:17:31.169 --> 00:17:33.248
is what people are addressing,

00:17:33.272 --> 00:17:36.593
then you discover that it's a nearly
universal phenomenon.

00:17:36.617 --> 00:17:38.247
Ironically, it turns out,

00:17:38.271 --> 00:17:41.679
that it's our differences
and our negotiation of difference

00:17:41.703 --> 00:17:42.957
that unite us.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:43.832 --> 00:17:48.832
I decided to have children
while I was working on this project.

00:17:49.292 --> 00:17:52.490
And many people were astonished and said,

00:17:52.514 --> 00:17:54.513
"But how can you decide to have children

00:17:54.537 --> 00:17:57.518
in the midst of studying
everything that can go wrong?"

00:17:58.550 --> 00:18:01.656
And I said, "I'm not studying
everything that can go wrong.

00:18:01.680 --> 00:18:04.792
What I'm studying is how much
love there can be,

00:18:04.816 --> 00:18:08.856
even when everything appears
to be going wrong."

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:09.499 --> 00:18:15.040
I thought a lot about the mother
of one disabled child I had seen,

00:18:15.064 --> 00:18:18.650
a severely disabled child
who died through caregiver neglect.

00:18:18.674 --> 00:18:21.698
And when his ashes
were interred, his mother said,

00:18:22.745 --> 00:18:29.656
"I pray here for forgiveness
for having been twice robbed:

00:18:29.680 --> 00:18:32.392
once of the child I wanted,

00:18:32.416 --> 00:18:35.020
and once of the son I loved."

00:18:35.577 --> 00:18:40.107
And I figured it was possible,
then, for anyone to love any child,

00:18:40.131 --> 00:18:42.469
if they had the effective will to do so.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:43.003 --> 00:18:47.966
So, my husband is the biological
father of two children

00:18:47.990 --> 00:18:50.095
with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis.

00:18:51.293 --> 00:18:54.802
I had a close friend from college
who'd gone through a divorce

00:18:54.826 --> 00:18:56.490
and wanted to have children.

00:18:56.514 --> 00:18:58.227
And so she and I have a daughter,

00:18:58.251 --> 00:19:00.466
and mother and daughter live in Texas.

00:19:00.490 --> 00:19:03.838
And my husband and I have a son
who lives with us all the time,

00:19:03.862 --> 00:19:06.222
of whom I am the biological father,

00:19:06.246 --> 00:19:09.970
and our surrogate
for the pregnancy was Laura,

00:19:09.994 --> 00:19:12.771
the lesbian mother
of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis.

00:19:12.795 --> 00:19:14.222
(Laughter)

00:19:14.246 --> 00:19:15.405
So --

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:15.429 --> 00:19:22.131
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:22.155 --> 00:19:26.530
The shorthand is: five parents
of four children in three states.

00:19:26.554 --> 00:19:27.648
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:27.672 --> 00:19:30.680
And there are people who think
that the existence of my family

00:19:30.704 --> 00:19:35.193
somehow undermines or weakens
or damages their family.

00:19:35.217 --> 00:19:38.747
And there are people who think
that families like mine

00:19:38.771 --> 00:19:40.425
shouldn't be allowed to exist.

00:19:40.449 --> 00:19:44.349
And I don't accept
subtractive models of love,

00:19:44.373 --> 00:19:45.752
only additive ones.

00:19:46.137 --> 00:19:49.640
And I believe that in the same way
that we need species diversity

00:19:49.664 --> 00:19:52.089
to ensure that the planet can go on,

00:19:52.113 --> 00:19:56.390
so we need this diversity
of affection and diversity of family

00:19:56.414 --> 00:19:59.693
in order to strengthen
the ecosphere of kindness.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:01.082 --> 00:20:03.480
The day after our son was born,

00:20:03.504 --> 00:20:05.943
the pediatrician came
into the hospital room

00:20:05.967 --> 00:20:07.858
and said she was concerned.

00:20:07.882 --> 00:20:11.000
He wasn't extending
his legs appropriately.

00:20:11.024 --> 00:20:13.561
She said that might mean
that he had brain damage.

00:20:13.585 --> 00:20:17.316
Insofar as he was extending them,
he was doing so asymmetrically,

00:20:17.340 --> 00:20:21.054
which she thought could mean that
there was a tumor of some kind in action.

00:20:21.078 --> 00:20:22.742
And he had a very large head,

00:20:22.766 --> 00:20:25.701
which she thought
might indicate hydrocephalus.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:25.725 --> 00:20:27.613
And as she told me all of these things,

00:20:27.637 --> 00:20:31.458
I felt the very center of my being
pouring out onto the floor.

00:20:31.482 --> 00:20:33.930
And I thought, "Here I had been
working for years

00:20:33.954 --> 00:20:36.479
on a book about how much
meaning people had found

00:20:36.503 --> 00:20:40.136
in the experience of parenting
children who were disabled,

00:20:40.160 --> 00:20:43.638
and I didn't want to join their number

00:20:43.662 --> 00:20:46.436
because what I was encountering
was an idea of illness."

00:20:46.460 --> 00:20:49.202
And like all parents
since the dawn of time,

00:20:49.226 --> 00:20:52.203
I wanted to protect my child from illness.

00:20:52.227 --> 00:20:55.470
And I wanted, also,
to protect myself from illness.

00:20:55.494 --> 00:20:58.241
And yet, I knew from the work I had done

00:20:58.265 --> 00:21:02.081
that if he had any of the things
we were about to start testing for,

00:21:02.105 --> 00:21:05.068
that those would ultimately
be his identity,

00:21:05.092 --> 00:21:09.131
and if they were his identity,
they would become my identity,

00:21:09.155 --> 00:21:13.423
that that illness was going to take
a very different shape as it unfolded.

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:13.447 --> 00:21:16.576
We took him to the MRI machine,
we took him to the CAT scanner,

00:21:16.600 --> 00:21:20.384
we took this day-old child and gave him
over for an arterial blood draw.

00:21:20.408 --> 00:21:21.669
We felt helpless.

00:21:21.693 --> 00:21:23.350
And at the end of five hours,

00:21:23.374 --> 00:21:25.586
they said that his brain
was completely clear

00:21:25.610 --> 00:21:28.388
and that he was by then
extending his legs correctly.

00:21:28.412 --> 00:21:31.412
And when I asked the pediatrician
what had been going on,

00:21:31.436 --> 00:21:35.596
she said she thought in the morning,
he had probably had a cramp.

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:35.620 --> 00:21:39.071
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:39.095 --> 00:21:40.357
But I thought --

00:21:40.381 --> 00:21:44.306
(Laughter)

00:21:44.330 --> 00:21:46.929
I thought how my mother was right.

00:21:46.953 --> 00:21:50.425
I thought, "The love you have
for your children

00:21:50.449 --> 00:21:53.811
is unlike any other feeling in the world.

00:21:53.835 --> 00:21:58.508
And until you have children,
you don't know what it feels like.

NOTE Paragraph

00:22:00.158 --> 00:22:02.294
I think children had ensnared me

00:22:02.318 --> 00:22:05.320
the moment I connected
fatherhood with loss.

00:22:06.138 --> 00:22:08.172
But I'm not sure I would have noticed that

00:22:08.196 --> 00:22:12.540
if I hadn't been so in the thick
of this research project of mine.

00:22:13.462 --> 00:22:16.578
I'd encountered so much strange love,

00:22:16.602 --> 00:22:20.323
and I fell very naturally
into its bewitching patterns.

00:22:20.347 --> 00:22:26.220
And I saw how splendor can illuminate
even the most abject vulnerabilities.

NOTE Paragraph

00:22:27.206 --> 00:22:30.988
During these 10 years,
I had witnessed and learned

00:22:31.012 --> 00:22:34.564
the terrifying joy
of unbearable responsibility,

00:22:34.588 --> 00:22:37.676
and I had come to see
how it conquers everything else.

00:22:38.264 --> 00:22:42.313
And while I had sometimes thought
the parents I was interviewing were fools,

00:22:42.337 --> 00:22:47.334
enslaving themselves to a lifetime's
journey with their thankless children

00:22:47.358 --> 00:22:50.516
and trying to breed
identity out of misery,

00:22:50.540 --> 00:22:55.163
I realized that day that my research
had built me a plank

00:22:55.187 --> 00:22:57.701
and that I was ready
to join them on their ship.

NOTE Paragraph

00:22:58.581 --> 00:22:59.789
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:22:59.813 --> 00:23:06.792
(Applause and cheers)

00:23:08.096 --> 00:23:09.246
Thank you.