so... for all the rmwc people.
i have been keeping in touch with grace gary, our speaker, and she sent me her speech so i am going to pass it on.
Translating Vita Abundantior
President Klein, good friend Lucy, parents, squires, faculty, friends, and stars of the occasion, thank you for inviting me to share part of this day with you. My first reaction to your invitation was very typical of a graduate of this college: I went online and ordered a boatload of anthologies of graduation speeches, and then I called my wisest and best friends and put together two committees -one on clothing and one on content.
That may not have been a good idea because I had trouble keeping the committees straight. In fact, the first draft of this talk turned out to be about how high your heel should be for a morning event, whether I should wear a dress or a suit, and how unfair it is that Michelle Obama can get away with not wearing panty hose. All of that may be useful information, but I don’t think it rises to the caliber of the talks I found in the anthologies.
After reading four such collections I am prepared to say that as a whole commencement speeches are chock full of good advice. They are so good that I wonder how it is that the world got into the mess it’s in now. Clearly, nobody listens to them. Mario Cuomo probably summed it up best when he said: “Commencement speakers should think of themselves as the body at an old-fashioned Irish wake. They need you in order to have the party, but nobody expects you to say much.”
Unfortunately, as anyone from the Class of ’76 could tell you, attending quietly is not my way. And, I didn’t buy new clothes, put on high heels and panty hose, and come all the way to Lynchburg just to talk to myself. SO LISTEN UP CLASS OF ’09, I’m taking ownership of this time.
And, that’s the beginning of what little good advice I have: understand that YOU own your life. It’s the only thing that will be completely, wholly, and unequivocally yours. Use it. The goal at the end of the day is to be yourself, not some pale imitation of a definition of success given to you by someone else. Listen to your dreams and have the confidence to pursue them.
And, never think that choosing one door closes all the others. You, too, can go to law school, detour into community organizing for a few years, and then segue into a gig running the free world. Yes, you can. Or, you could start at a tire factory and end up running a historic house museum.
Will you get all of it right? Of course not, but contrary to the prevailing wisdom, life usually does give you do-overs. Six years ago I was unemployed. Today I have the best job in the world.
The challenge is having the stamina to last out the tough times. Joseph Campbell said that life is “the hero’s journey,” but he also warned us that part of each journey will be spent on “the road of trials.” That’s what makes you a hero.
Knowing that everyone is going to face some trials may be the reason so many commencement speakers in my anthologies felt the need to warn graduates about the time ahead of them. These followed a theme: the times were often described as “difficult,” sometimes they were “exciting,” sometimes “challenging,” occasionally “times of great possibility,” and in one example, even “hardheaded times.”
I am a historian, so I feel confident in saying to you “balderdash.” All times are “challenging,” ‘exciting,” “difficult,” and “hardheaded.” They all offer great possibilities. The only truth you need to know about the times we live in is that this is your time. You’ll have no other.
Time has no meaning in itself; the meaning is whatever you bring to it. I was twenty-five when I went back to graduate school. I remember worrying to a friend that I would be an ancient twenty-eight when I finished and faced with “starting over”. My friend, who was much wiser than I, pointed out that in three years I would be twenty-eight whether I went to graduate school or not. Time only has the meaning you give it.
One of the best lines ever uttered is “when Mozart was your age, he’d been dead for x number of years.” But, Ronald Reagan’s speedy debate response that he didn’t plan to make his opponent’s “youth and inexperience” a campaign issue is every bit as good a line.
We hear so much about the Mozarts, the Picassos, and the Sergei Brins that many of us assume that if you haven’t made your mark by age 30, you might as well give up. In doing so, we impose an artificial deadline on ourselves that is unrealistic and has no meaning outside our own minds.
For every Picasso there is a Cezanne, who only came into his own in his 60s; for every Sergei Brin, a Grace Hopper, who laid the groundwork for COBOL, an early computer language, when in her 50s; for every Bill Gates, a Sam Walton who started Wal-Mart at 44 or Ray Kroc who began building the McDonald’s empire at 52; and, I’ll put Julia Child up against Rachel Ray any day of the week.
Which is not to say that your “road of trials” will not begin tomorrow. In every graduating class since the beginning of time there have been some people who knew they were going to graduate school, some people who already had jobs, and some people who had no idea what they were going to do and who found themselves a few months later working in a tire factory. But, if there is any lesson to be learned from the last few years, surely, it is that nothing is ever safe.
If you can look at your first steps beyond the red-brick wall as part of a process and understand that your first job does not define the limits of what is possible, there is a very real chance that you will emerge from this time of national uncertainty with a strong sense of what you want to do and how to begin to do it. And, in this-finding purpose in uncertainty-YOU have an edge over almost every other graduating class in the country.
When I asked Paula Wallace who you were, she said you were “the students who chose to stay.” You’ve already been through more stress, uncertainty, unpleasantness, and discomfort than most people twice your age. You are veteran adaptors, and, while it was an unintended consequence of the college’s transformation, this experience will stand you in good stead in the next few years. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
Now, lest I begin to sound too much like Pollyanna, I know these are difficult, uncertain, challenging, and, perhaps, even hardheaded times. If you doubt it, just turn on the TV, open a magazine, pick up a newspaper, read a blog... any and every one of them will tell you over and over again that our country is facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Things are bad, but we are still a long way from the Great Depression. In 1933 fully 50% of the work force in the United States was unemployed or under-employed. Between 1929 and 1933, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 90%. We’re a long way from the Great Depression.
Bad as the 1930s were, however, they were a time of almost unprecedented creativity. Faulkner, Hemingway, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston, Eugene O’Neill, Margaret Mitchell, Langston Hughes, Stephen Vincent Benet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Frank Lloyd Wright, Grandma Moses, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, Aaron Copland, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hart, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Snow White and the Wizard of Oz... each brightened the dark days of the Depression.
Why the list? to illustrate the reason you should study history. You should study history, and you should study it now more than ever, because history gives us hope. No matter how high your mountain, how great your obstacles, how uncertain, difficult, or hardheaded your time someone before you had it much worse. And, more to the point, made good out of it. We are a resilient people, and we do great things. We always have, and we always will.
My anthologies have taught me that commencement speakers usually end by exhorting graduates to do specific, practical things like “sit up straight,” return your library books,” and “wear sunscreen.”
You should do all that, but I’ve thought about this and I have three other pieces of very specific advice for you. The first is know who your heroes are. Find some of them in history; find some of them among your friends and family; and, find some of them in the world around you. Identifying your heroes will define your personal values.
One of my heroes, a wise man named Otto Haas, once told me that all successful relationships are based on shared values. It was the best advice I’ve ever been given.
My second goal for you is to read. Read, read, read. Read as if your life depended on it then read some more. Those of you who succeed in life will do so because you never stopped learning. In itself, that’s a definition of success-a lifetime spent learning. Read, read, read.
And, finally, combining the two, every time anyone writes a new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt read it. Take the time to go back and read the old ones, too. If ever anyone’s life illustrates the immateriality of time, the strength gained from adaptability, and the power of hope over uncertainty, it is Eleanor Roosevelt’s.
You know the outlines of the story: her beautiful mother told her she was an ugly child then died; her father was an alcoholic who died in an asylum when she was 10; she was raised by an elderly and unsympathetic grandmother and had to lock her bedroom door at night to keep out her lecherous uncles; then she married the handsome prince Franklin and gave him six children, one of whom died as an infant; after a while Franklin’s eye wandered and Eleanor learned he was having an affair with her closest friend. She and Franklin stayed together for all the wrong reasons, and then he got polio. Eleanor became his eyes and ears, and, at age 37 this shy woman toured the country making speeches on his behalf. Franklin became governor of New York and then President of the United States smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression.
The year before FDR took office more than 40,000 World War One veterans assembled in Washington demanding the early payment of their promised military bonus. Herbert Hoover ordered Douglas MacArthur and the United States Army to disperse them, which they did at bayonet point and with gas. Hundreds of members of the Bonus Army were injured and several were killed. The next year when the veterans again assembled in DC, FDR sent Eleanor to talk to them. “Hoover sent the Army, Roosevelt sent his wife.”
Truth be told, however, few armies could match Eleanor. “She was the first woman to address a national political convention, to write a syndicated newspaper column, to earn money as a public lecturer, to be a radio commentator, and to hold regular press conferences.” She was a tireless campaigner for civil rights. Her support for Marian Anderson is well-known; less-well-known are her actions in Birmingham in 1938. She was attending the Southern Conference for Human Welfare when police chief Bull Connor
interrupted the meeting to insist that attendees adhere to the city’s segregation laws. Eleanor refused to move to the white section and placed her chair firmly in the middle of the dividing line between black and white.
In the 1950s the KKK offered a reward for her murder, and
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI told her they couldn’t protect her. She told them she didn’t expect them to.
Her greatest legacy is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations in 1949. After FDR’s death, Truman appointed Eleanor as a delegate to the UN, and she served for seven years. She became chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, and it is generally agreed that the Declaration would not have passed without her leadership. The New York Times reported “even the Russians seem to have met their match in Mrs. Roosevelt.”
She said of the Declaration, “We wanted as many nations as possible to accept the fact that men... were born free and equal in dignity and rights, that they were endowed with reason and conscience, and should act toward one another in the spirit of brotherhood.”
As your speaker today, I am supposed to challenge you. This then is my challenge to you: live each day so as to make Mrs. Roosevelt’s sixty-year old words finally become a reality. As a class you chose this last year to act toward one another in the spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. Now, take that civility with you into the world; you could just change it.
The day after Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin published a drawing that was syndicated in newspapers all over the country. It showed a group of little cherubs peering over a cloud. The caption read, “It’s her!” It’s her... everyone in the world knew who they saw coming. Eleanor Roosevelt lived in difficult, challenging, exciting and hardheaded times; she knew every twist and turn on the “road of trials;” but, she lived true to one of her own mottos: “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” That’s how heroes translate “vita abundantior.” But, then you already know that.
Thank you and good luck.
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