It seems strange that someone from my generation should be standing here giving a speech that traditionally includes advice from the older generation to the younger, for the world we hand over to you is hardly one that should inspire confidence in my generation’s ability to provide advice about anything.
True, my generation ended the Cold War, flew humans to the moon and back, made the computer almost a household appliance, and invented reality TV. Yet despite these accomplishments our generation will never have someone title a book about us “The Greatest Generation.”
Yet our generation was one of whom so much was expected. John F. Kennedy sounded the call for service when, as he said, the torch was passed to us. The words from his inaugural have often been quoted:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
Initially we responded to that call with unbridled enthusiasm in ways that pushed the envelope and left our “Greatest Generation” parents shaking their heads. We gave the world the Peace Corps, the Voting Rights Act, Earth Day, the Endangered Species Act, and proposed the Equal Rights Amendment. It would seem those accomplishments alone would earn our generation a solid place in history.
Yet amidst all this flurry of idealism some went terribly wrong. Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch were among the first to sense it, a self-absorption that earned us the dubious nickname of the Me Generation.
Maybe the deaths started it all, those awful bullets fired by twisted minds that literally alter the course of history. One by one our heroes went down: John, Martin, Bobby and all those young men in Vietnam. We had a president decline to run for a second term and his successor earn the ignominious distinction of being the only president to resign from office in scandal.
Some time after that Kennedy’s challenge turned upside down. Some time after that idealism unraveled. Some time after that we became not a lost generation but an ironic generation whose prime aesthetic styled itself as post-modernism, as if we were over the edge, off Thomas Friedman’s flat earth into an abyss we still do not comprehend.
You of the younger generation all know the list as well as we do: global warming, nuclear proliferation, a society where the gap between rich and poor is the largest it has been in a century, and the world flaming with religious conflicts that threaten to become a conflagration rivaling the late Middle Ages.
Sometimes when I lie awake on one of those nights when my pain will not let me sleep, I wonder why you do not hate us more. We have left you tuition debts that amount to more than my first mortgage. We have left you glaciers melting in Alaska and genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. We have left you on the verge of what some say may be an other Depression brought on by government and personal debt that defies rationality. We have left you more insecure at home than any generation since the nineteenth century.
But for some reason you do not hate us, nor do you pity us. You do not seem impatient to shove us aside so we don’t mess things up any more than we have already. But that is understandable, for our generation is like the driver of an out-of-control car who turns to the passenger and says, “Here, you take the wheel.”
That this withering of idealism should come with what I have termed the strange death of Liberal America should be no surprise. When John Kennedy challenged us to service, he invoked the basic principle of Liberal America that government –which is all of us acting collectively–exists to keep the playing field level.
So as Kennedy’s words faded to that graveyard of lost ideals–high school textbooks–the playing field tilted as a playground teeter-totter tilts when someone on one side gets up and walks away. The whys that brought us from “what can you do for your country,” to the mangled English of George W. Bush would take too long to recite here. Besides, our generation, which has become so contentious that I have nicknamed these times the Era of Bad Feelings, has–as you would expect–some radically different ideas about the whys of our failures.
But graduation speeches should not be about the past but the future. There is a sense your generation has become pragmatic and focused on the possible, perhaps as a reaction to our failed idealism and its companions–irony and self-righteousness.
In 1838 in another graduation speech, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to the senior class at Harvard’s Divinity School. He said:
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue…He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being.
Then comes one of those Emersonian paradoxes that have kept the scholars busy:
A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
Ignoring sexist language almost two centuries old, it seems that the paradox of these words speaks directly to today’s graduates even more than they spoke to Emerson’s. “Who renounces himself comes to himself.” In his own time Emerson would call on his fellow Americans to look beyond the pragmatic, the mundane, the edveryday:
The horseman serves the horse,
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
‘Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
Sound familiar? Emerson was a young man when he wrote those words and they bristle with the impatience of the young with the old. He was looking ahead to a life that would literally change the world. I am an old man looking back not with impatience or even with resignation, but with the spirit of John Kennedy and the ideals of Liberal America.
I have carried in my wallet for thirty-some years a quotation by Kennedy, that has now faded, but whose meaning has informed much of my life.
The kind of society we build, the kind of power we generate, the kind of enthusiasm we incite, all of this will tell us whether, in the long run, darkness or light overtake the world.
The torch again needs to be passed, even if its flame flickers faintly and threatens to blow out in the foul air of our times. Things may be in the saddle, but they need not be your things or your saddle. Emerson speaks to your generation because like you, he lived at a pivotal moment in history.
You will live in ever more consequential times, times where each act, each word, each idea resonates with a meaning that can only come from confronting a crossroads where one path surely leads to the abyss at the edge of the world. Yet none of us knows which path that is. We have run out of roadmaps and the GPS has no sense of direction.
In that situation, as Emerson knew, you must rely on your own moral compass and not be misled by the tilt of the playing field. To paraphrase Emerson, “Who renounces the path, comes to the path.”
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