If we’re honest with ourselves, there are very few people qualified to give commencement speeches to this class of graduates. The world is a roulette wheel of uncertainty, and we all tend to forget how important a sense of possibility was to us after high school or, if we’re lucky, college graduation. So how can wisdom rendered from an entirely different time apply to the present, without sounding out of touch?
The real question is, was this photo just as creepy before the masks were Photoshopped in?
Motown’s Berry Gordy was our commencement speaker the year I graduated college, and I remember thinking how much the world had already changed since his hey day in the 60s and 70s. The music business had become a corporate labyrinth that left artists without ownership of their master recordings and independent record labels scrambled in a landscape of peer to peer file sharing. Meanwhile, we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Enron was taken to court for fraud, thousands protested for immigration rights, and the housing market was tap dancing its final act, with already bleak job prospects. How do you say something meaningful to the class entering that workforce?
I don’t remember a thing about Mr. Gordy’s speech, but I do remember our collective feeling of wanting so desperately to make something big happen.
This year, Good Morning America did their best with Matthew McConaughey’s commencement speech overlayed to his “It’s About Us” PSA Americana stock footage. Brené Brown spoke to her UT Austin fellow alumni about getting back up and beginning again. Ashton Kutcher addressed University of Iowa graduates from his bunker somewhere and told them that life will definitely not go as planned. You know…you’ll be a model, then an actor, a reality show producer, and a philanthropist...you never KNOW! Even President Barack Obama's speech, the Patron Saint of Hope, fell a little flat for me. “Since I’m one of the old guys, I won’t tell you what to do with this power.” Even the guy who rallied a broken nation to believe in something again in record numbers doesn’t feel qualified to address these graduates.
So, are there truths that cut through the noise without veering into cliché? Make it count. Just keep living. Throw out the plan. Do what you think is right. Build a community. It all seems anemic for the task.
Joy Harjo (Mysoke Nation), U.S. Poet Laureate
Maybe we should turn to more elders and poets right now. Representatives of a people who have faced uncertainty and demonstrated a resilience that the world has never seen before. U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo (Mvskoke Nation), came to prominence with her poem, “I Give You Back”, which feels fiercely relevant to me right now. An excerpt:
I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart
my heart, my heart, my heart.
But come here, fear.
I am alive and you are so afraid of dying.
But I suppose you can’t deliver that kind of raw truth over Instagram Live.