I just came back home from giving the commencement address at my high school in Indiana. A few months ago, when the headmaster invited me, I was disinclined to do it. I already had given a "do what you love" commencement speech, and I didn't see much point in repeating myself.

But on the day I had planned to decline, I was organizing old boxes in the attic — something I try to do once a generation — and found a thick file of papers labeled "La Lumiere School." It was filled with my old report cards, teacher comments, news clips, old programs, all kinds of embarrassing things. I read every word on every page. Then I called up the headmaster and said, "I'm coming."

What prompted me above all to change my mind were the comments written on my report card from a teacher of mine who recently died. The first semester after I arrived at the school, he wrote that I was "a little reluctant to laugh with people and more prone to laugh at them."

He kept writing on the same theme with each semester's report card, and by the end, he wrote that I was "integrated into the class," which I believe meant that I had eked out, on this special measure, a passing grade.

So I thought I owed it to my school to come back and talk about character and its connection to community, because the spirit of community, in my experience, is what truly makes the school stand out.

There are many dimensions of character, of course. But my teacher was telling me that a big part of character means you don't separate yourself from those you think are different from you — or become intolerant of them or laugh at them. This aspect of character, if you can build it, gives you a chance to have real community.

Our country, I told the graduates, is not doing very well by this measure of character, and consequently, we're facing special challenges of community here in America.

I mentioned the book "The Big Sort," by Bill Bishop, who points out that we in the United States have started sorting ourselves into separate communities. We're choosing neighborhoods, churches, civic groups and workplaces according to whether people think the same way we do. And when we separate ourselves into groups of people who all think as we do, we start demonizing people on the other side.

I made the point that if the factions that divide America took hold at their school and threatened their community, people would see the danger and mobilize against it. Those factions, I told the graduates, "are the opposite of what you've learned here. They're the antithesis of what makes this place so special."

I told them that the best way to change society is to refuse to let society change you. And I implored them never to become a member of a group that defines itself by its distaste for someone else.

In closing, I told them that I still miss the place 35 years after I graduated. I have thought a long time about why — and now I think I know. When I was a student there, my teachers and coaches and classmates knew me well — and liked me anyway. And I liked them back. It wasn't just one or two friends. It was a network of deep friendships built on affection and respect. That is what it means to have a community. It is a deep source of happiness, and once you taste it, you don't ever forget it.

So I urged them to keep building community wherever they go.

I hedged a bit here. I didn't tell them how hard it is to build community after you leave school. This is a country that cherishes its personal freedoms. In expressing that freedom, we often leave community, and then, feeling its loss, we try to replace it with something narrower and more artificial. Increasingly, we create community with people not because they are family or classmates or colleagues or parents of our kids' friends or people who like the hobbies we like. We create "community" with people who share our "worldview." It's a poor foundation for community; some people are ineligible because they don't think the way I do, and the others are on probation because they may change their minds.

I fell in love with those graduates, sitting there in their caps and gowns, brandishing their awesome youth. I hope they don't become like us.

Tom Rosshirt was a national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a foreign affairs spokesman for Vice President Al Gore. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Tom Rosshirt and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.