Room for a View

The “We Generation” Opportunity
Speech by Sydney Schanberg . Edited by Lorna Tychostup

Photo by Lorna Tychostup

It has become common knowledge, gathered from opinion polls and simple, man-on-the-street interviews, that commencement speeches—they are by law required to contain a maximum number of clichés, truisms, platitudes, banalities and boilerplate—are the least remembered events on the planet.
Just ask any slightly older person in your family or circle of friends, ask them what the speaker said at their graduation ceremony and you will immediately confirm this sad statistic. Yes, sometimes people can remember the name of the speaker, or at least the last name…but that’s about it. I remember my graduation speaker was the remarkable Helen Keller. I can’t recall a single word of her address.

Thus, on this auspicious day, I come before you courageously—facing the virtually certain risk of delivering just another forgettable graduation speech. I would be grateful if you refrained from booing or hissing, even at the most forgettable passages. However, cheering and applause—unlikely as it is that such urges will seize you—are permitted.

If any of you are concealing bottles of champagne or other libations under your gowns, please feel free to sip from that at any time, if this is necessary to keep you awake.

And so, I now step away from comedy—into the void.
Looking around the country these days, sizing up one’s prospects for the future, a college graduate might well come to believe that his or her outlook wasn’t terribly encouraging. People are being laid off their jobs by the thousands, the homeless population is growing fast, in the big cities the lines are growing longer at food pantries and soup kitchens. Not only that, but the threat of terrorism is in the air, the nation is nervous and crime is even rising, after a long and welcome downturn, because the police are stretched thin with extra security duties.

Sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? But maybe not. Bear with me a bit while I tilt the situation to a different angle and take a look at things from another perspective.

I was only a youngster during World War II, but I remember a lot of interesting things happening to me that I don’t regret now. In fact I look back on them fondly. There was food rationing and gas rationing and the rationing of rubber. You needed ration stamps for automobile tires, for butter, for meat, for a lot of things made scarce by the war effort. There were just two movie houses in my small town in Massachusetts, the Globe and the Strand. Mostly, they were open only on weekends. During the war, you could get in free if you brought five pounds of scrap metal or a pound of aluminum foil, the kind you could peel off the paper in cigarette packs. It was a big emotional high for a kid—getting in free and feeling good about doing something to help with the war.

There were some profiteers then, people who took advantage of the war to make money—somewhat like the corporations lobbying right now for big tax breaks in Washington instead of pitching in to help the unemployed or the victims of September 11. But mostly back then, people did pitch in. You didn’t hear a lot of complaining when you went to the store and stood in line for butter. You felt like you were a part of something bigger than yourself, something you didn’t quite understand but nonetheless made you feel relevant, useful, not just looking out for yourself.

Now, don’t get tense and start your teeth grinding. I’m not going to give you the what-it-was-like-in-the-old-days routine. How we had to walk three miles to school in snowstorms and chop wood for the fire when we got home. All I want you to do is to allow yourselves for a few minutes to think about how all the troubles and challenges we’re confronted with now could have a very positive side.
As a society, we haven’t been called on to make many sacrifices over the past 50 years. Yes, certain segments of our culture have made more sacrifices than others—blue-collar people, minority groups, children in depressed areas like Appalachia. They more than others made the sacrifice of risking life to fight in Korea and again in Vietnam. They have also made the sacrifices of living at the lower end of the economic food chain and getting only the trickle-down leavings too much of the time. This democracy isn’t perfect yet. But by and large since the Second World War, the nation prospered and grew and the standard of living rose significantly and our freedoms were protected.

And from where I sit, I think we began to take for granted the owning of our own homes and having a car, maybe two of them and for some maybe even a swimming pool. Then came the technology boom and the stock market bubble and we began thinking that every year things were automatically on course to get even better—and of course that was foolish. History should have told us that there are always bumps—the roads aren’t paved smooth with platinum.

What if the problems we face now bring us closer as Americans, as World War II did in the 1940s and afterward? I know that a lot of you have been thinking about how you can make a contribution, how you can be relevant. I know this because everywhere I go these days, people bring up the subject—they want to help, they want to make a difference. I also know it because I have that feeling myself. As a journalist, I’ve covered a lot of wars, a lot of suffering. I’ve written about these things as a professional duty. Now I would like to do something about them. I’m willing to bet that a whole bunch of you feel the same way. You want to be valuable—not just successful for yourself and your families, but valuable and feeling good about yourselves.

What you face now is a great opportunity. True, jobs and other benefits will not come to you as easily as they did to the generations that immediately preceded you.

But you can prevail over that. More important, you can become not just another version of the several “me” generations, but instead a new “we” generation. The beginnings of this possibility have already been witnessed in the World Trade Center tragedy and its aftermath. People have taken risks for others without hesitation. People have come together more than they had in a long time. People have volunteered for community service. The question is: Can we sustain these new beginnings, keep them going? Or will we soon slip back into lazy ways, into self-indulgence and instant gratification?

This body of graduates, this body of hard-working achievers here today who were not born with silver spoons or silver anything in their mouths, you—you can decide which way it will go, which direction our culture will take.

The people I’ve admired most in my life’s journey are people who do the “we” thing, who are able to do for others—doctors, nurses, members of the clergy, firefighters, police, social workers, teachers, coaches, parents who spend real time with their kids. And let us not leave out the soldiers, like the ones fighting in Afghanistan right now. I can’t tell you how many times soldiers looked after me and kept me safe in my reporter’s life. War does carry evil with it, because its goal is to kill before someone kills you—and in every war, innocents get killed and that is always evil. But soldiers are not evil; they are looking after us and doing, at great risk, what we ask of them. And we need them to be there because there are times, to my mind, when war is just plain necessary because someone is clearly trying to destroy you, and you must defend your hearth and your family.

I really do believe that all these obstacles that are being thrown in your path are actually opportunities in disguise. I think you can have richer lives because of them. You can be a generation that mattered more than many others.

The task is not likely to be easy. Nothing really worthwhile is ever a walk in the park. Obviously, these judgments are taken from my personal experiences, from the times when I have found satisfactions in my life. Almost all of them have happened in the midst of difficulty and travail.

Our government leaders to some extent have been slow to see the opportunities in this tragedy. They have rallied us to war but not yet to equally shared sacrifice, not yet to common national service. This is not unusual. Political leaders are often slower than the citizenry to understand and rise to challenges. They are perhaps too removed from the street and the workplace and the field. No matter. In history, more often than not, it has been the people who teach the leaders, who lead the leaders.

We have seen some of this demonstrated in the horrific events of September 11. The people who selflessly rose up to help others, many of them giving their lives in the accomplishment of the deed, they had not before been hailed or rewarded as leaders—but they had been there all the time and they led us. Believe me, they will be remembered well.

And now you, this generation of graduates, have had the baton passed to you. You’ve been given the chance to pick us up and lead us through this mess we’re in, this hate, this plague.
I honestly envy you. I also honor you. Imagine the chance of being named the “We” generation.

Happy graduation, and much good luck. Thank you.