Foresight 20/20; A Commencement Address for our Graduates

Parents, Friends and Neighbors, we stand here today to honor our 2020 graduates. 

It cannot go without saying that 2020 has been a strange year. I don’t think any of us was, nor could have been, prepared for the sudden arrival of a pandemic. Our lives have been turned upside-down. The norms and expectations of everything, including and particularly celebration, have been curtailed. The globalized economy has collapsed like a house of cards, and the highest levels of leadership have proven themselves to be insubstantial, even unfit, but certainly unready to meet such a crisis where it needs to be met – often treating this environment as though human needs are not an integral part of it.

Suddenly everything came to a halt, and we were mainly limited to being at home, really only going out for essential procurements or essential work. It doesn’t take long for people, so used to social commerce, to become bored, isolated, sad. On March 18^th, I awoke from a dream and these words lingered from it, so I wrote them down and gave them a title: 

Together, Alone

We hike along a way
we’d usually share abreast,
but right now, we each move
together, alone.

The distance is forced and,
as two pendulums in motion would,
we try to match our steps,
try to meet in mind,
mindful of the gap.

A contagion we can’t see
threatens to separate us;
to divide and conquer
by means of infection
is the metaphor of this age.

This disease might save us,
if we could embrace a truth
writ large by the threat:
we live webs of intersections;
as we go, it is together, all one.

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

A year of promise begun in the Fall got the wind sucked out it in February and March. To borrow a book title from Judith Viorst, for many students this has been a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” year. It is of little consolation that a year such as this is not unprecedented in the history of our nation and our world.

In 1918, the world, already in the grips of World War I for a full year, was hit by an avian H1N1 virus that came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Troop movement is thought to have been the primary means of spreading this virus, and there were three primary waves of infection. Then, as now, public heath officials recommended the wearing of masks, proximal distancing, and quarantine as the primary methods by which to slow the spread of the disease and allow it to play itself out. 

In his commencement address to the 1918 graduating class of the University of Indiana, Mr. Rough and Ready, Theodore Roosevelt, nine years out of office as our 26^thPresident, said:

We need institutions of technical teaching, of technical learning in the country; but in my judgment, we need more the institutions that teach broad, cultural development, which this nation needs more than it needs anything else. We need the kind of learning acquired not because it can be turned into money but because it is worth so much more than money.

Let [each person] remember that no nation ever yet amounted to anything or ever will amount to anything if it consisted simply of money-getters, and if the trophies and proofs of its success consisted merely in the symbols of successful money-getting. The money must be there as a basis, but by no means as broad a basis as most of the very successful… among us have made it in their lives. [Money] is only [a] foundation, and the foundation is worthless unless upon it you build the super-structure of the higher life, the life with ideals of beauty, of nobility, of achievement of good for the sake of doing what is good, the life of service and sacrifice in any one of a hundred lines, all directed toward the welfare of our common country.

I hope it isn’t trite to say that though this year has been tough, we’ve all learned that doing good, in the simple way Roosevelt defined it, is something that can be done by going to work or school, or even by staying at home—doing the best we can, whatever any specific circumstances demand. We’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t work has been unmasked– as façade or out and out fraud – for all to see, if they are willing. We’ve learned that “Being together, all one” is part of our social contract, an act of cooperation we agree to do as a group even if we are self-isolating.

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That you have arrived at this day is not, per se, a miracle. You’ve been nurtured and encouraged by parents, grandparents, neighbors, teachers and coaches, ever since the day you were born. But that you have arrived at this milestone is an accomplishment—your accomplishment, a result of your hard work. Even, sometimes, boredom, contributes to growth, being the parent of invention.

You’ve spent so much of your life in school but, let me just say, school’s not over, yet – life is what some would call “Continuing Education.” I’m sure you’ve survived any number of “group projects”, during your time in Middle and High School, even College. When asked why students thought they were being given such assignments, at least 85% percent respond, “In order to lower my GPA.” As hated as these exercises are, there is a point to them; they are short experiments in the realities of cooperation. In these “controlled” experiments, the group you end up with must work together to produce a result. You get to choose who you hang out with at lunch and after school, but you mostly never get to choose who is going to be working with you on such assignments nor in any job setting. You and several or a bunch of others are thrown together to solve a problem and deliver a report or a product. Some members of the group have skills; some can organize, some are smart but flaky, while others might be excellent at avoidance all together. You have to find someone willing to take the thankless lead, and then together you have to plan meetings, benchmarks and goals, and each person has to agree to Do Their Part. This is nothing less than a social contract. Sometimes the results aren’t that great, but you can breathe a sigh of relief when your presentation is over, even if you were up until 2am making the PowerPoint presentation because you had to wait for one of your partners to email the data and another partner to email the text. This is a microcosm of real life; we all muddle along just like this, and every such experience offers an opportunity to observe people, and this contributes to your developing critical thought process. One thing you learn is that even people with the best of plans encounter issues that can cause them to change course. If there’s one rule of thumb you can live by, it’s this: Everything takes four times longer to accomplish than you think it should, from simple chores on up. And yet, there is art and grace to be found in all of this, and joy.

Perhaps, during our shelter-in-place, in our quiet meditations, we have made some important observations. Perhaps we’ve been able to breathe cleaner air. Perhaps we have been able to actually hear the birds singing without the continuous hum of traffic and construction to dampen their songs. Perhaps we have been able to see the moon and stars more clearly at night. Perhaps we have discovered – and maybe to our surprise – that a lifestyle of rushing around and being artificially busy is not required in order to live fully and productively. Perhaps we have thought about how much energy – personal energy, as well as resource energy – is wasted when everything and everyone is constantly turned on and in motion. Perhaps we have concerned ourselves with how isolation might be impacting others, because we know how deeply it has impacted us. Perhaps we have observed that all are not treated equally or based on truly demonstrated merit. Perhaps we’ve finally heard and identified divisive rhetoric and platitudes, and been upset by them. Perhaps, in thinking about all these things, we have thought of solutions to certain problems. 

What ideas have you had during this time that you think are worthy to pursue? Ideas that can help us do more than just muddle along? Such ideas are the capital on which every former society has been, and any newer society, can be built. 

In the words of a Fleetwood Mac song from my generation:

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be, better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone

Right now, we are still in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for the pandemic threat to be “yesterday,” and some of us marching to demand greater social justice. As difficult as it is to be missing out on shared celebrations with your peers, I hope you realize that you are experiencing history first-hand, and that this moment is but a spring-board to the next phase of yours and all our lives. You are on the ground floor, and everything goes up from here. In the parlance of business, disruption is the fertile ground for innovation. Carpe diem, seize the day! This historic moment contains the seeds of opportunity that you and all your classmates can cultivate toward holistic and positive change so desperately needed in our world, changes that don’t treat humanity as if it is detached from the environment or subservient to money, changes that honor individual personhood. 

As we slowly return to a “new normal,” I hope that you will be able to safely rejoin your classmates and extended family in celebration of your collective achievements, and that those celebrations will be all the more fully experienced and cherished because of the crisis we have lived through. 

In the meanwhile, we congratulate you and the entire Class of 2020, and hope that the springboard of current events will catapult all of you to success in the fields of your choice, with the best wishes and continued support of all of us. We are confident that you and your generation have and will further develop and employ critical discernment, and with it the capacity to concentrate on those issues pertinent to the “common good,” and we have high hopes that every new construct you have imagined can be realized to make the world “better than before,” where each person has a place and a vital role. You have heard the phrase, “20/20 hindsight” – it is our hope that you and everyone in your generation will look on the year 2020 as a challenge to look ahead, to make leaps forward and to lead, leveraging your knowledge of the past and, now, new perspective and energy toward building a better, safer, more loving world for us all, a world with just a touch of 20/20 foresight.

Best to you always, 

Elisabeth Eliassen
your neighbor and fellow citizen

© 2020 by Elisabeth Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

This address is for all students who were unable to partake of a commencement gathering with their fellow students and families. I wrote this specifically for a young man, a neighbor, who grew up with my kids. I want all our graduates know that they are special and that they live in a special time, and that they can shape the world. I pulled out the more personal comments directed toward our young friend, but the message is the same for all.