G R A D U A T I O N
S P E E C H
Sam
Smith
From a graduation speech
delivered at Washington's John Eaton public elementary school
in 1977. At the time, the school went through the 8th grade.'
The title of my speech
is "The Future Lies Ahead." This pretty much sums up
what people are meant to say at graduations, so I thought I would
take care of it in the title and move on to some other business.
It has always seemed to me that graduation was a little late
to be giving advice but perhaps a few random notes may be of
some assistance.
First of all, parents:
they're middle-aged, right? And Peter Ustinov says that the trouble
with middle-aged people is that they're too far away from either
of the most important mysteries of life: birth and death. My
father used to say that the reason that grandparents and grandchildren
got on so well was because they had a common enemy. For myself,
I think one of the problems with parents is that they can never
decide whether you should be in the White House or in jail. They
exaggerate both their expectations and their disappointments.
But remember that most of this exaggeration comes from two sources;
hope and love. They have higher hopes for you than anyone other
than yourself and this is nice. But you know your hopes often
disappoint you and that's hard enough. It's even harder sometimes
to deal with someone else who has high hopes for you, and I'm
sorry to say it doesn't end when you leave your parents. At 39,
I still find dealing with other people's expectations difficult.
John Cage, the experimental composer, once said that when people
finally approved of what he did, all they wanted him to do was
repeat it. He wanted to try something new, but the pressure was
to just do it over again. This kind of dilemma will follow you
to your grave, so relax and learn to live with it.
Love is also a two-edged
blade. It provides warmth, humanity, and comfort, but it also
demands and takes. Remember that Mr. Spock didn't understand
love because it wasn't' logical. In fact, especially with your
parents, its manifestations sometimes seem to border on mental
illness. Which is why, perhaps, so many people go to psychiatrists
looking for love.
I can't tell you how to
deal with this conflict except to recognize the unavailability
of the free lunch. If you want to go through life with complete
freedom, unimpeded self-expression, then you also have to be
ready to go through life lonely. If you want to share in love
and community and mutual support then you have to be willing
to give up something of yourself in return. Parents offer love
and hope but in the process become like that definition of the
English House of Lords - indefensible and indispensable.
Second, a note on being
a teenager: Adults conform just as much as teenagers do. The
problem is that teenagers are asked to conform to both adult
and teenager values at the same time. This can be a little confusing.
But there's something else wrong with the setup. Adults tend
to regard your age as the ragged, unruly end of childhood, rather
than the beginning of adulthood. Go back a couple of centuries
and you'll find 16-year olds who were captains of ships and 14
year olds who were serving as apprentices or doing a full day's
adult work on the farm.
You are capable of it,
but if you were to drop out of school and try to find a job in
what we adults strangely called the 'real' world, you wouldn't
have much luck. Why? The truth is that we need people to stay
in school as long as they can in order to keep the unemployment
rate down. It is not our social system but our economy that has
determined that there be no useful role for teenagers. Now adults
don't want you to discover this so when you start demanding something
meaningful, they may give you freedom rather than responsibility,
and when the sort of aimless freedom that adults sometimes grant
young people backfires in a car accident or a drug bust, we blame
the teenager. It is, of course, stupid to ask young people to
find purpose in life when the system is specifically designed
to deny them a useful function.
Well, pretty much. If we
ever get in a war again, you'll find the country suddenly finding
a place for you - on the front lines. I would think a country
that can trust its teenagers to defend it in time of war could
find more useful roles for them in time of peace.
But we adults won't fight
this battle for you, although we have taken a few steps, like
lowering the voting age. You've got to figure it out for yourselves
and make us listen. And, you only have a few years in which to
do it. Then, you, too, will be too old and may begin to stop
caring.
Third, a note on failure:
Everyone tells you how to succeed, but I bet you get damn little
advice on how to fail - which is strange, because if you're normal,
you're going to spend more time failing than succeeding. Try
to learn the difference between the failure that comes from laziness,
indifference, or stupidity and that which comes from other sources.
For example, there's the
failure that comes with trying to do something that you won't
be able to do right until tomorrow or the next day or next year.
Those of you who took part in the musical yesterday know what
I'm talking about.
It took many hours of voluntary
failure to produce one hour of success. And now that you've succeeded,
you perhaps have the courage to fail again so, you can succeed
at something even harder next time.
Then there's the failure
of the just cause. Most good causes started out as lost causes.
If no one had been willing to fail at a just cause, we would
still be fighting in Vietnam and eating at segregated lunch counters
and the women in the Eaton class of '77 would not be expected
to go to college.
Finally there is the failure
that is not yours; .but the judgment of other people Don't let
other people tell you when you've failed. Listen to them but
not at the exclusion of your heart or own judgment. Other people
are poor judges of your success or failure.
One last note: I'm sure
people have asked you, "What do you want to be when you
grow up?" There are two things wrong with that question.
First, I know and you know
that you are right now. If you put off being until
you're fully grown you may discover that it's passed you by.
Second, adults usually
want you to respond with a noun: I want to be a doctor, a lawyer,
an investigative reporter. You can fool them by answering with
adjectives like I want to be warm, useful, and happy. It is,
after all, those sorts of wants that will matter most in the
long run. If what you want to be is only a noun, you'll probably
end up like that and the sadder for it. But if you pick the right
adjectives, you can end up like Frank Skeffington, the political
boss hero of The Last Hurrah. In the last scene he lies on his
deathbed and an unctious Roger Sugrue intones, "Well, the
one thing we all know is that if Frank had to do it all over
again, he would have done it differently." Frank Skeffington
raises himself from his bed, looks the guy in the eye and says,
"Like hell I would," and dies. Happy.
Thank you.
Copyright 1977 Progressive
Review
