I had the privilege of delivering the keynote address at Lewisburg Area High School's Baccalaureate. A few people asked me to share those remarks.
Advice
from a person a little older than most of your parents sounds out of touch, but
ever since I finished high school, I have spent my life surrounded by people
who have recently finished high school, first as one of them, and since, as a
teacher, advisor, and an administrator.
Each
of us has a limited number of opportunities to reassert or reinvent ourselves,
and you are approaching one of them. Whether you are going to college, pursuing
technical training, or entering the workforce, you are about to make a
community leap.
Most
of you have been together for years, and you don’t need to close the door on
your current community of friends, but each of you is about to encounter a new
cohort of friends, classmates, mentors, and neighbors who don’t know you. They
don’t remember the great things you have done, and, more importantly, they
don’t remember the embarrassing things you have done. You have a fresh start,
use it wisely.
Always
be yourself, but I encourage you to spend the next few weeks thinking about any
moments in your life you wish you could do over or would emphatically do again,
and let them help inform how you enter the next chapter in your life.
You
are entering a pivotal time in your life in which you will encounter a much
greater level of independence and personal responsibility. It is a sobering
realization to find yourself solely in your life’s driver’s seat, but you have
many willing, sometimes too willing, co-pilots. Be comforted by their support,
but remember that it is your course to steer.
We
often hear the labels and descriptions of GenX, GenY, and millennials. Most of
the time, those describing are critical if not downright disparaging, and often
they are remarkably uninformed. Here are some ways your generation differs from
those before you. As a group, you report significantly higher levels of
depression and anxiety, and you are generally less independent from your
families in decision making. You are also less prone to bigotry and intolerance,
and you are more committed to fairness and issues of social justice.
Some of those
differences are of concern, but most of them are cause for optimism for our
future. Let’s consider those differences and think about how you can best
navigate them to your advantage.
Depression and Anxiety
Social media
and delayed independence are two causes for some of these changes. Social media
create unbridled opportunities for bullying, but the fear of missing out makes
it hard to avoid. I had been on Facebook from the beginning, but a few months
ago, I quit, and I am glad I did. The world around you is almost always more
interesting than the phone in your hand. I’m not suggesting that you shun
technology, but don’t miss out on the real world around you as a slave of
media.
Brian Chen, the
Personal Technology columnist for the New
York Times recently wrote this about cancelling his Facebook account:
Over the 14 years that I used Facebook,
I accrued about 500 friends. Most were former classmates whom I had lost touch
with. In my real life, I have about 20 friends I talk to on a regular basis. So,
when I finally deleted Facebook, the fallout was underwhelming.
In the past 40
years, the average age when parents first let their children go someplace with
a friend unsupervised has gone from 5 or 6 to 11 or 12. Those unchaperoned
experiences create a lot of opportunities for conflicts and necessitate the
need to resolve them without help. Resolving problems teaches us to become
resilient, and nationwide, your generation has had far fewer opportunities to
develop that resilience than any previous time.
As you enter
what will be the most independent period you have yet experienced, remember
that most problems you encounter are less significant than they feel at the
moment. Stop and think through a problem objectively and consider the advice you
would provide a friend at a similar intersection in their life. Thinking about
a personal challenge from the outside always reduces its magnitude.
Decision Making
Over that the
past 20 years, there has been a remarkable shift in how young adults engage
their parents in decision making. I think part of it has to do with the ubiquity
of cell-phone communication, but the students I work with now consistently
consult their parents when they make decisions. This is fundamentally a good
thing. Be careful to remember that you are ultimately responsible for the
choices you make. Getting informed opinions is a smart way to make good
decisions.
The great Swiss
psychologist, Carl Jung, would have said I’m wrong. He wrote:
The great decisions of human life have
as a rule far more to do with instincts and other mysterious unconscious
factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.
You can still
try to be rational. There are also plenty of moments when advice is neither
timely nor available. That can be particularly challenging, because your brains
are not finished developing. You have your full intellectual capacity, but your
frontal cortex and the neural networks that send messages back and forth
between it and the amygdala will still be under construction for another 7 or 8
years. The amygdala is where your fight and flight reactions occur. As those
neural connections expand, so does our ability to temper immediate responses
with rational judgement.
At 18, you are physically
more likely to make bad spontaneous decisions than when you’re 25. Do you ever
say to yourself, “I should have known
better?” Or ask, “Why did I do that?” Often, it’s because the less
sophisticated part of your brain took off before the sophisticated part could
send a message to the contrary over wiring that isn’t completely connected.
That’s why people
say, stop and count to ten before you do something you might regret. Train
yourselves to take a beat so the front and back of your brain have time to
communicate. It is also important for you to know that those connections are
especially susceptible to alcohol. Young adults are more physiologically inclined
to have their judgement affected by alcohol than older adults. Older adults
don’t fare a whole lot better, but being self-aware is an important part of
avoiding bad decisions.
Tolerance and Inclusion/ Doing
the Right Thing
In
my role at Susquehanna, I regularly speak and write about citizen leadership.
Every generation has bequeathed a collection of problems, often of their own
making, to their children and their children’s children. My generation
inherited the Cold War and legalized racism. Yours is inheriting global
warming, anti-intellectualism, and the seeming death knell of civility. I’m
sorry for that, but as I said earlier, your generation is the most inclusive in
history and dedicated to social justice in inspiring ways. I am hopeful that
you are up teaching us to be better.
The
debate over global warming is an important lesson in how to be an informed
citizen. First and
foremost, it is no longer a topic for debate. There is a 97% consensus among peer-reviewed scientific research that
human beings are causing global warming. The Academies of Science in over 80
countries agree, and yet every day, we still hear arguments instead of a
unanimous call to action.
Look for the
motivations of the speakers on both sides of a debate. If personal gain is
aligned with one side and not the other, the side with nothing to gain usually
has more merit. For example, years after medical research had identified the
health threats associated with smoking, cigarette companies continued to
advertise the benefits of their product citing studies they had funded for
their own benefit.
There are many
who suggest that climate has already become a lost cause, but I have seen
students and faculty from my campus introduce precision conservation techniques
to waterways throughout our region that have dramatically restored trout
streams and lowered their temperatures in a short period of time. How can you advance
environmental stewardship? This is your home, and you should want to protect
it.
We
are at an inflection point as a society in which values of pluralism and
inclusion have come under attack in the media, in public discourse, and in
politics. We use terms like tribalism, and you only need to turn on the news to
hear messages of fear mongering and denigration. Populism is on the rise around
the globe.
Your
generation is by the far the most tolerant and supportive of difference in our
nation’s history at a time when older generations are regressing. Please don’t
let the loud voices of bigotry turn you in their direction. You have the
ability to be advocates for what is right. To be successful requires an abundance
of grace, which is a quality in desperately short supply these days.
It
is difficult to resist an angry response when we observe ignorant and hateful
behavior, but yelling at someone has rarely enlightened them. All too often it deepens
their convictions.
I
so often hear people use the term “politically correct” as a term of
disparagement. Being sensitive to the feelings of others and moderating our
behavior out of human respect is a very good and right thing. But often, we
correct others in ways that hurt them. Telling people that they are
ignorant, no matter how true it may be, is as hurtful as the behavior we are
trying to correct.
Asking
people why they feel the way they do or say the things they say is a better
beginning, because it forces them to put a logical frame around an illogical
picture. It also provides a chance for you to listen for any common ground.
That can be a useful touch point as you share what you believe to be true and
why. Small children are beautifully open to difference. We each learn our
prejudices, which means we can unlearn them, but that will only be achieved by
lifting up those with whom we disagree. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said,
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot
drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only
love can do that.
As
scripture says,
Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you, and persecute you.
That is tough
advice to take, which is why it is such a rare behavior. Imagine our world if
it were common.
If you think
about it, each of the issues I have addressed this evening is fundamentally
about how we react to the world around us.
To provide the
kind of leadership our world needs, will require courage and imagination, and
it will require a generation collectively committed to making myriad
incremental steps in the right direction. I have great confidence that you are
up to the task. To succeed:
You will need
to feed your passions and steer them with intellect. As you encounter obstacles
and challenges, embrace them. As Helen Keller wrote:
… character cannot be
developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can
the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success
achieved.
Once you
embrace your obstacles, work to understand them objectively and dissect them
into solvable portions.
Be mindful that
disappointments are just that, and never forget to learn everything you can
from the moments that don’t go as you wished.
Celebrate each
person for who they are, and be encouraged to live authentically.
Advocate for
those who are afraid to speak for themselves.
Return hate
with love, and never be afraid to do the right thing.
These thoughts
have been focused on the future, but the best piece of advice I have for you is
not to take the present for granted. At Susquehanna, our baccalaureate is
focused on gratitude. Despite all the challenges that inhabit our world, we are
surrounded by immeasurable good fortune.
There is a poem
by James Agee I turn to frequently. In it, he wrote:
All my people are larger bodies than
mine,
with voices gentle and meaningless
like the voices of sleeping bird.
One
is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are,
all on this earth.
Every day, we
are surrounded by people and events that deserve to be celebrated and treasured.
As you take on the task of making our future better be sure to savor the many
gifts that surround you at each moment. This is one of those moments.
