This article is a commencement speech delivered by the author on May 26 at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. In his speech, the author focused on affirming public discourse, civic morality, and what it might mean to conduct your lives as engaged citizens attentive to the suffering of others and the fragility of democracy itself. He said he has been writing about education, social justice, and democracy in the United States for over 30 years. He has done so not because he is motivated by some lofty notion of the perfect society, but because he believes that any talk about the future has to begin with the issue of youth, who more than any other group embody the projected desires, dreams, and commitments of society's obligations to the future. This recognition echoes a classical principle of modernity in which youth both symbolized society's responsibility to the future and offered a measure of its progress. Youth in this instance provides a moral and political referent for how people translate the future and assume a large measure of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions, and modes of education that enable young people to work toward the promise of an inclusive, sustainable, and peaceful global democracy. Within such a project, democracy is measured by the well-being of youth, while the status of how a society imagines the promise of democracy is contingent on how it views its planetary responsibility towards future generations. (Contains 11 notes.)