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Today's college graduates have grown up in a world where technology has accelerated faster than a Toyota with faulty floor mats. The year of their birth saw the laying of the first trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable, capable of carrying 40,000 simultaneous phone calls. Only 2 million Americans had cell phones that year, a number that is now about 286 million -- 91 percent of the population. The iPod arrived just in time for the start of their teenage years, and the iPhone hit the streets at the end of their freshman year of college.

I have learned, in my strolls throughout the campus, to check for earbuds when Muhlenberg College students don't respond to my greetings on Academic Row.

I grew up in a family of five in the 1950s in Kentucky. We had one black-and-white television and one car. Needless to say, we all learned to compromise on what to watch and where to go.

Compare this barbarous standard of living with contemporary circumstances: Many families have two or more cars, so we tend to go where we please, when we please. We have our own playlists and headsets. There are more television sets than human beings in the United States and an almost infinite number of cable channels. And we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, on Hulu, YouTube or our DVRs.

When it comes to politics, we can listen exclusively to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, or we can tune in to Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher. We need not watch anything we're not interested in, nor listen to anything we disagree with, nor to anyone who might challenge our assumptions and make us think.

We have evolved into an a la carte society. We expect to get what we want, exactly what we want, when we want it. And we cannot understand why we should wait, share or pay for anything we don't want or won't use.

But consider our nation's accomplishments during that ''barbaric'' period from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Between 1930 and 1950, virtually all rural households were electrified. Beginning in 1947, the GI Bill threw open the doors of higher education to almost 8 million former servicemen and -women. Beginning in the mid-1950s, our country built an interstate highway system 44,000 miles long, with more than 50,000 bridges and overpasses. In only 11 years, from 1958 to 1969, America developed a space program that went from its first satellite launch to Neil Armstrong's moon walk.

Most of these projects were funded by federal tax dollars. They could not have been achieved without shared commitment to the nation's progress and a willingness to subordinate personal desires to overarching public priorities.

Today, we have no such consensus. The issues that divide us are almost too numerous to list. Civil debate and rational discussion are as extinct as VCRs.

Don't blame today's graduates for this state of affairs; the trend began with my generation and its objection to the draft during the war in Vietnam and thereafter.

That particular war was misguided, but our abandonment of the principle of universal national service has fundamentally weakened the fabric of our nation. I believe it has led to the obsession with low taxes and to the increasingly shrill rhetoric when certain groups feel their choices may be limited to accommodate the needs of others.

Given the bitter fight over health care reform, it is inconceivable that the current body politic could undertake any significant public good on the scale of the interstate highway system, rural electrification or the GI Bill.

Compromise is an essential ingredient in the success of a caring society and a humane nation.

Compromise demands that we try to understand and value the life experiences and needs that have shaped another individual's view of reality, and then to look back from that person's perspective at our own assumptions and priorities.

Sometimes we need to subordinate our own desires, convenience and comfort to the common good. The ability to make such sacrifices graciously, even cheerfully, is fundamental to community.

I've gotten to know the current generation of college graduates pretty well over the past four years. They are smart, disciplined and courageous -- and they have the potential to change our great, but self-absorbed, society for the better. For our nation's sake, I hope they fulfill that potential.

Peyton R. Helm is president of Muhlenberg College in Allentown. This piece is based on his baccalaureate address to the Class of 2010 on Saturday.