It has become a tradition to end the year with my seniors by writing speeches. Each student writes a commencement speech to deliver to the rest of the class, and I write one as well. Here is my message to this year's graduating class, who are headed out into a world that desperately needs their intellect, creativity, empathy, and passion.
This year, for the first time, I also made a recorded version posted to YouTube. You watch that here or read the transcript below. Feel free to share.
Fourth marking period is normally my favorite marking period with seniors. I can jettison diction, and due dates, and debate skills and just chat about where you are going next year, what you hope to become. I lean on my desk after class, the smell of fresh cut grass wafting through windows on waves of heat, and hear about your dreams taking shape. Your excitement reverberates off the cinderblock. Your energy hums louder than the fluorescent lights. In the minutes between classes we talk about nothing and everything, and slowly you prepare to leave. Slowly, I prepare to see you go.
That has been stolen and I feel the loss of this pandemic in all those missed conversations. To those fortunate enough to have avoided COVID-19: I hope you remain safe and healthy. For those whose family members have lost their jobs: I hope they are back to work soon. For those whose loved ones have passed away from the disease: I am profoundly sorry.
Your senior year has been decimated by this pandemic and I want to take a moment to mourn that loss together. So here is an incomplete list of things you have lost. Senior trip and all its Mickey-eared magic. Prom, prom dresses, prom pictures, proma, promenade. You have missed trying to pin a boutonniere to your date’s lapel, the frenetic sweat-soaked dance floor, the ride to the shore where for one weekend the salt air smells only of adventure, and excitement, and the boundless future. Graduation - at least in all its normal crowded, beach-ball-tossing, sun-drenched, air horn-blaring, what’s-he-wearing-under-that-gown glory. You have lost yearbook signings. You have lost the time of year when hugs pass from person to person more easily than this virus.
I am sure some of you are worried that you have been robbed of some of the best experiences of your lives, because people keep telling you that high school is the best time of your lives. That is unequivocally wrong. I really enjoyed high school, but now at age forty-four, there is not a single experience from high school that remains on any top-ten list in my life. I could not tell you who I went to prom with, or recount a single memory from my senior trip. Don’t believe anyone who tells you these are the best years of your lives. You are just starting out. So, try to move quickly beyond mourning the losses of these last few months and instead look to the future.
The world needs your help.
Cities all across America have been burning this past week. After watching George Floyd’s murder the righteous outrage of peaceful protests have spilled over to violence and destruction. Again we are forced to look at the systemic racism of this country that has created, and continues to create, two very different Americas depending on your race.
Again we are forced to listen to arguments that completely miss the point, like those saying “All Lives Matter” or trying to rhetorically diminish the protesters' cause by calling them “thugs,” by speaking of “riots” rather than “rebellion.” Now is the time to analyze words closely. Our founding fathers looted British ships, stealing their goods and tossing them overboard, and we have celebrated them since with the euphemistic title of the “Boston Tea Party.” I find it unlikely that in the shadows there were not a few bad seeds thinking, “Sweet, free tea!” The armfuls they stole have been lost to history behind the larger reality: brave patriots rebelling. Or was it thugs rioting? Semantics are tricky.
Again we are forced to examine the concept of privilege. Here is an illustration.
If I passed a counterfeit twenty at a local convenience store, as George Floyd is alleged to have done, an employee would have come around the counter as I walked out the door. “Excuse me, sir,” they would say. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think this is a real twenty-dollar bill.” The police would not be called.
If the police were called, the officer would approach me in a similar fashion. “Good afternoon, sir,” he would begin. If I had knowingly passed a counterfeit twenty, even had a wallet stuffed with them, the officer would assume it had been a mistake. He would size me up in a moment as a suburban white male and draw conclusions based off of that.
Those conclusions would benefit my well-being rather than endanger it.
The police would never assume that my reaching for a wallet was actually reaching for a gun, as an officer did before fatally shooting Philando Castile. I don’t believe I would have to repeat multiple times that I could not breathe before the choke hold that killed Eric Garner or the knee to the neck that killed George Floyd was relaxed.
I can wear a hoodie without being stalked and killed by a neighborhood watchman like Trayvon Martin. I can go running in a white t-shirt and shorts certain I will never be hunted down by my neighbors as Ahmaud Arbery was. I can sleep at night knowing with certainty that police will not bust down the door and gun me down as they did Breonna Taylor. I can kindly ask someone to leash their dog, as Christian Cooper did, without fear of my race being leveraged against me. I could not begin, in a speech this short, to name them all.
Obviously many police are good people working to protect and serve. Obviously they are not all racist. Not the point. We live in two separate Americas. Flames of outrage should be burning inside of all of us right now until that injustice has been fixed. Consider making that fight part of your life moving forward. It is time to decide who you will be and what you will stand for.
The move from high school to college hands you the mythical blank slate. From here on you write the narrative of your own life, in your own words, with your own voice.
Perhaps the slower pace of quarantine has a bit of a silver lining, giving you time to reflect before making that leap to your new life. Our present circumstances demand you think deeply. They demand you pull back and look at the bigger picture. They demand you see just how fortunate you are. They demand you ask yourself how you will use the privilege of a good school and a safe community.
On the eve of your graduation we find ourselves in a world of turmoil. The world cries out for heroes, and you are a room full of them. Those of you who have remained socially distant to slow the spread of his disease are heroes. Each time you put on your mask to better protect those with suppressed immune systems, or the elderly, or people without healthcare, you are engaging in a heroic act.
You are heroes each time you call someone out when they make a racist statement, or point out the inequities of education and economics that limit the opportunities of some while advancing the opportunities of others. It is heroic each time you skip the selfie and turn that camera outward in the hopes of creating a post that is beautiful, or funny, or inspiring, or truthful. It is a heroic act when you use your social media platforms to promote justice and equality. You are heroes each time you stand up against a sexist joke, a homophobic punchline, an unwanted touch.
I hope you see how the work you have done this year can help you with that. Critical reading is not taught so that you can wade through a Shakespearean play when you find it in the back corner of some used bookstore. Critical reading is so that you will carefully consider where you get your news, so you will consider the subtext behind the messages some people hope you will just echo on their behalf without any thought of your own simply launching sound bites and headlines like so many word-grenades. Debating skills are not academic exercises, but the fabric of healthy public discourse. Writing is a means both of reflecting on your own lives, and advocating for the change you want to see in a way that will make people listen.
In a recent commencement address President Barack Obama said, “This pandemic has shaken up the status quo and laid bare a lot of our country’s deep-seated problems — from massive economic inequality to ongoing racial disparities to a lack of basic health care for people who need it. It’s woken a lot of young people up to the fact that the old ways of doing things just don’t work; that it doesn’t matter how much money you make if everyone around you is hungry and sick; and that our society and our democracy only work when we think not just about ourselves, but about each other.” He goes on to say that the world we find ourselves in is “Your generation’s world to shape.”
Like President Obama, I am one of the old guys and I won’t stand here and tell you how to do it. The world I am handing off to you as you graduate from high school is not the one I hoped to hand off when I stood in your shoes and envisioned my own future. It is not the world I want my sons to inherit either.
Rather than any advice, I just have a request. My request as you graduate and head out into the lives you will create for yourselves is that you keep thinking deeply. Keep reading the world around you as carefully and critically as we have read literature in class. Keep thinking about your words, select them carefully, and revise. Then share them with the world with your voice that is bold, and assertive, and true.
I wish you all fulfillment and confidence.
Congratulations.
Beautiful speech once again Jeremy!
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