Johnson's closing passage is a cascade of parallel declarations that bring her sweeping themes — global ecology, national renewal, generational responsibility — down to the most intimate and actionable scale. She has spent the speech telling graduates they hold the new clay of America's future, that the nation goes from beginning to beginning, and that this generation's distinctive quality is its simultaneous concern with the largest and smallest things. Now she makes the turn: all of it starts with you, individually. A better government begins with your own vote. A safer world begins with your own active concern. The poetry of the repetition drives home her philosophy that what is everybody's business often proves to be nobody's business — so the work must begin with the individual.