Biden tells Delaware grads to step up, 'now it's your hour'

NEWARK, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden told graduates Saturday at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, that “now it's your hour,” as he encouraged young people in the United States to help the country live up to its ideals.

Speaking to more than 6,000 graduates, and with the nation mourning victims of two mass shootings in as many weeks. Biden lamented the division and hatred in the country he governs. He bemoaned a “crisis of faith” in U.S. institutions and he pressed graduates to work to bind up the country's wounds.

“Your generation, more than anyone else will have to answer the question, Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we believe? Who will we be?" Biden said. “You can make the difference, you can lift the country up, you can meet the challenges of our time."

“There’s one message I hope you take from me today: This is no time to be on the sidelines,” he added. “We need all of you to get engaged in public life and the life of this nation.”

Biden told graduates to remember that “democracy is a human enterprise.”

“We do many things well,” the president said. “Sometimes we fall short. That’s true in our own lives. It’s true in the life of the nation. And yet democracy makes progress possible. And progress comes when we begin to see each other again not as enemies but as neighbors.’"

Biden spoke of the country's bitter division over Vietnam in the 1960s and the grief that followed the killings of “heroes” — two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. But through those tumultuous times came progress on civil rights and voting rights, for example, the president said.

“Well, now it’s your hour. The challenges are immense, foreign and domestic, but so are the possibilities. … Everything is possible in...