Would-be graduation speech

Here is the graduation speech that I "auditioned" to give to my classmates at Macalester College. But I didn't get picked, so this speech never got spoke. I'm not bitter about it (you did a great job Rachel!!), but I still really like what I would have said, so I'm saying it here. And since it's about hope, it seems kind of obnoxiously ironic to post it on April Fool's Day. ;) I mean what I say about hope, though, no fooling!

Hello my fellow graduates of 2005, faculty, staff, family and friends. I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today, and I would like to use it to share with you a quote that has been important to me. I read this a couple of years ago in the Utne Reader magazine, another venerable Twin cities institution. The article was an interview with Tony Kushner, who you may know as the writer of the play Angels in America, which was recently made into an HBO movie. The interviewer asked Kushner where he draws his hope from. And this was his response:

You don’t look at it [hope, that is] as a feeling state; you look at it as an ethical obligation. You look at it as the thing that you generate in yourself by recognizing that despair is a luxury. Not for everyone. Some people are really burdened by life, either because of chemicals in their brains or terrible personal circumstances or social circumstances that make despair inescapable. But most people in this country aren’t. And since most of us aren’t, we have an ethical obligation to look for hope and find it. It isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. In fact, if it were easy, it would be less valuable. It’s like the Jewish search for God. One of the Talmudic ideas for why it’s so hard is that you create its value by the difficulty of the search. We all do it. That’s what our struggle is. We wouldn’t get out of bed otherwise.

When I first read that, I had a ‘hmm” experience. Hmm! Incidentally, that is one of the highest praises I think one can give to a piece of art. “Hmm” means something has startled you, snapped you out of chewing your mental cud. We college students are very adept at information grazing, just sort of mindlessly stuffing it in. But every once in a while, something suddenly tastes different, new, and it catches our attention. It’s something to chew on, as they say. And this quote definitely earned a “hmm.” It stuck around in my head for months until eventually I had to dig the magazine out from the mountain of junk mail on my coffee table and copy down the passage for my quote board.

I think the quote impacted me so because it totally reframed the debate. Hope as an ethical obligation. I’d thought about ethical obligations before. Some rather banal, like I have an ethical obligation to brush my teeth so I don’t waste all that money my parents spent on braces. And others rather profound, like I have an ethical obligation to promote justice in the world, in whatever ways I can. But hope. Hope I’d seen as sort of the limiting factor in all of this. You work as hard as you can toward meeting your ethical obligations, as long as you have hope. But hope is fragile, fickle; it becomes a liability of sorts. If it unexpectedly runs dry, you and your ethical obligations are out of luck. You have no choice but to give up and retreat to cynicism.

But Kushner flipped that all around for me. After reading that quote, I realized that hope is much more than just something else you need to get the project done, like paperclips or a fax machine. No, hope is the project. Hope is what we work toward, because in and of itself, it is transformative. Jim Wallis, who spoke here at Mac a couple of months ago, said, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.” Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning, and hope is what changes the world.

So what does that mean for us here today? It means we have a project as we go out into the world to nurture hope in ourselves and to create environments that nurture hope in others. Do we have adequate preparation for this project? I’m not sure. We’ve been told time and time again what a good education this institution provides, ever since that first recruitment letter arrived in our mailboxes, up until today. And it’s true! Attending Macalester is a unique privilege, one that we’ve been lucky enough to have. The things we’ve learned here, the people we’ve met here have given us many skills to do amazing things in this world. But other skills, things like generating hope, are much less tangible. They don’t show up well on a syllabus. They’re hard to teach, and hard to learn. But they are the most important. I’m far less interested in our potential to be doctors, lawyers, presidents, whatever, than our potential to be decent, hopeful human beings. That is truly our project, whether we’re doctors or lawyers or teachers or business people or store clerks or pizza delivery guys. That’s our project as friends, as partners, as parents. It’s our project as citizens of our respective countries. And if we can complete our project, and learn to be hopeful, we will have accomplished something great.

I’m not going to tell you what to hope for, because that would be presumptuous. Nor am I going to tell you how to find your hope, because unfortunately I don’t know. I will simply tell you to believe that the value is made by the difficulty of the search. Have hope, spread hope, and if all else fails, brush your teeth.

Thank you for a great four years, and congratulations!