Green closed with a story about his Kuwaiti roommate Hassan, who lost touch with his family during the U.S. invasion of Iraq and spent weeks watching cable news in anguish. One day, as a camera panned across a bombed-out house in Baghdad with Arabic graffiti on a piece of plywood, the news anchor talked about 'anger on the Arab street.' Hassan started laughing for the first time in weeks. The graffiti said: 'Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.' Green used this story to illustrate the fundamental choice we face every day: how to read the actions, words, and lives of people whose experiences we cannot directly access. He urged graduates to choose, as often as possible, the interpretation that acknowledges the full complexity of other people's lives — to remember, borrowing from Walt Whitman, that every person contains multitudes. This struggle toward empathy, he said, is the most important gift and challenge of their education.