Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford and all other Ivy League snobs assure their alumni a passport to dream jobs on an easy street. For the rest — happy hunting!
If words had wings, we all would fly; if words could open magic casements on the oceans wide, we would dive deep to make the world our oyster.
Alas, words are but transient, temporal, and at times trifle trite!
Renting the summer air with advice, words oxidize like fireflies. Rising from the halls of learning all across America, politicians, journalists, comics, celebrities, millionaires — all shell out words so glamorous, so shiny, that even the dumbest among the graduating classes drop their jaws to lustily dream of life beyond the drab and the dreary!
But, before we get cozy with words: ‘Yes! You can’, or ‘Go girl, go’, spare a thought for the ordinary Joe or Jane living their daily slog, the working class stiff of America, who too sat in rows, once upon a time, covered with scholarly caps and capes, hearing brave words cascade from their commencement speakers. Yes, they too heard the self-same sermons, the stirring slogans to go forth and raise hell.
Try as they might, the doors of destiny never opened wide enough for most.
Does then the label you wear on your school or college shirt have anything to do with how life behaves with you upon its embarkation? You bet!
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford and all other Ivy League snobs assure their alumni a passport to dream jobs on an easy street. For the rest — happy hunting!
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At a private school — boasting a pedigree as old as 230 years — and priding over its best and brightest entering Ivy League colleges each year, it was an eloquent commencement address ‘Listen Here’ by a parent, Marc Charney, an editor at The New York Times.
“You’ve heard a lot these last few days about how good your hearts and your minds are. And that’s all true. But I’ve noticed something else as well, and it just might be the most valuable resource of all: You’ve got finely-tuned ears. By which I mean you’ve learned well how to listen to others. America — the world — could use a whole lot more of that these days.”
Said the staff editor of the Times’ most authoritative Sunday magazine, The Week in Review, that he became a journalist because the “thought that maybe — just maybe — a little more information could help people become a little more reasonable. It sounds pompous now, but that’s really what some of us thought.”
“No matter how much Hollywood makes those years look like one long party, it was much more than that. Oh, we enjoyed ourselves. We had great music. We laughed at our parents sometimes and we bonded with each other and lived life pretty full. But ours was a world split in two, and when we thought about it, we all knew there was a cloud we lived under, the threat of another world war.”
A rather foolish optimism set in about 10 years ago, continued Charney, “one futurist (Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History) said things had become so good that history itself had ended ... well history’s back — and playing some nasty tricks on us.”
So what do we do about it? Asked the newspaperman of the Newark Academy graduates — still in their teens — sitting on the green under a gorgeous blue Sunday sky. Brendan, his son, among them.
“The first is that, after you’re done listening, you get to make up your own mind. And your ideas can make a difference ... speak or write — your own mind. It can be in a college group, or a town council, or a business association. A local newspaper, a school board, a cause or a charity. Whatever. Your ideas and your presence matter.”
Second, just because you’ve learned well the crucial value of tolerating other points of view, don’t be afraid to put forward your own. Some students today shrink from strong debate, because they’re afraid they’ll hurt the feelings of others. “Please don’t forget that conflicts of ideas aren’t deadly. And democracy can’t survive without debate.”
Finally, “Keep listening.”
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‘Listening’ and ‘debate’, the two words in my echo chamber, catapulted me to the storm that Charney’s colleague at the Times, the Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, created last year by a blunt commencement address. Three minutes into his anti-Iraq war speech, the microphone was unplugged, the booing began and the Rockford graduates turned their backs on him. Fox TV called him a ‘hack’ because he had dared to declare: “What saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them. For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.”
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” No, these are not Hedges’ words, but of a French social critic, Alexis de Tocqueville, exactly two centuries ago when he visited America!
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And then there are those whose advice is too abstract, fluffy, feel-good. Parse some abstractions: “Words like ‘leadership,’ ‘resolve’ and ‘determination’ are just words until they are brought to life by men and women who dedicate themselves to the profession of arms and the security and well-being of the nation.” — Gen Colin Powell to the 1992 graduates of US Military Academy, West Point, New York.
“Whatever you want to do, do it now. For life is time, and time is all there is.” — Gloria Steinem, the feminist, to the 1987 graduates of Tufts University.
“When I was growing up in the 1950s, segregation was the law of the state ..... I was not allowed to grow up thinking of myself as a victim, and if you look anything like me, neither should you. Just let us all agree on what the rules are, judge fairly, and reward results consistently.” Arthur Ashe, the tennis champ who died of AIDS, to the 1990 graduates of Kean College, New Jersey.
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Another ex-NYT writer, a woman, Anna Quindlen — who gave up her job to care for her kids — advised students to stop being perfect: “Make today the day to put down the backpack” she urged students in 1999 at Mount Holyoke, America’s oldest women’s college. “Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it’s too hard, and at another, it’s too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist (the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate) of wherever and whenever you happen to be.”
But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
Jettison, the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. “Look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.”
Most commencement speeches, she said, suggest you take up something or other: the challenge of the future, a vision of the 21st century. “Instead I’d like you to give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great leaps into the unknown.”
Rock star Bono said it best: “What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age? What’s worth spending your post-Penn (University of Pennsylvania) lives trying to do or undo?
“It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth. Could that be it? Could that be it?”
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford and all other Ivy League snobs assure their alumni a passport to dream jobs on an easy street. For the rest — happy hunting! 
