Go forth with your degrees

Every spring, Poor Elijah waits by the phone for an invitation to speak at a graduation ceremony, and every spring nobody calls. Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., addressed Harvard’s commencement, Prime Minister Trudeau spoke to NYU’s graduates at Yankee Stadium, and President Trump appeared at Annapolis, which he identified in a tweet as “our GREAT Naval Academy,” as if that august institution would ever need to shout in uppercase letters.

Those who are truly great don’t need to shout their greatness. This is a lesson many of us need to learn.

This year, once more, the only invitation Poor Elijah received was mine, so he’s again delivering his remarks on my porch. The traditional pitcher of iced coffee is on the wicker table, and there’s a pair of rocking chairs over by the railing.

For Poor Elijah: commencement speech

I have a theory about how we got where we are today. If it hadn’t been for the Depression, the Greatest Generation wouldn’t have grown up accustomed to sacrifice. They also wouldn’t have compensated for their childhood hardships by excelling as providers and consumers. The resulting liberty and affluence freed their Baby Boomer children, like me, to temporarily reject materialism and dabble in alternative lifestyles.

Welcome to the era of peace, love, and a charge account at the campus bookstore.

Welcome, as well, to the 1970s cultural imperative, “If it feels good, do it.” That headlong pursuit of pleasure and self-interest, cloaked variously in hedonism and self-righteousness, has left us today gazing like Narcissus at our own reflections as we fall ever more deeply and inexplicably in love with the image we see. We clamor for empowerment as we grow more incompetent. We view our faults through tinted lenses when we look at them at all. We are experts at blame and strangers to responsibility.

I don’t pretend the diagnosis is that simple. Back in 1865, President Lincoln suggested that the Civil War was God’s judgment on the nation for slavery, and that that judgment could rightly extend until “all the wealth” accrued by forced labor and “every drop of blood shed by the lash” would be repaid. Perhaps we’re still paying.

I do know that I’ve taught otherwise decent students, soon to be young men and women, who have no idea they’re not the center of the universe. Mostly this isn’t their fault. At least it didn’t begin as their fault. We neglect them as we dote on our own fulfillment. We hook toddlers up to electronic devices as we stare at our own. We make their education “student-centered.” We empower children to pick and choose what they want to learn. We negotiate justice with adolescents and excuse their bad behavior. We deal as equals with the aberrant and deranged, and we grant credibility to their derangements. We encourage everyone to equate what they feel with what is right.

We are infecting the next generation with our narcissism. We have rendered them self-absorbed and chronically aggrieved. We have throttled self-restraint and licensed self-indulgence.

We needn’t wonder at the epidemic of mass shootings. It’s a short step from self-absorption and an exaggerated sense of grievance to unbridled, selfindulgent homicidal rage.

In all this, the generation I’m talking about is today’s students and you, today’s graduates. It would be easy to dismiss what I’m saying as the disgruntled ravings of a man on the downhill side of life. I hope you won’t do that. I hope you’ll consider this a warning. We are standing at a precipice. You are standing there, too.

I also hope you won’t be disheartened. Narcissism is fatal, but it isn’t incurable. It requires grappling with your own insignificance. You are small compared to Providence, small compared to the cosmos, small compared to justice, small compared to wisdom, small compared to history.

So am I.

This isn’t to say you’re unimportant. You’re important to those you love and to those whose lives you touch.

But your friends aren’t the strangers who visit you on Facebook. Your every thought isn’t worth a tweet, and your every experience doesn’t warrant publication.

Achievement doesn’t brag. It doesn’t need to. Leaders don’t bully. They don’t need to. Vulgarity isn’t honesty. Coarse talk isn’t straight talk. Alternative facts aren’t facts. Lies aren’t truth. Reality television isn’t reality. Here in the country of my birth, reality is barely reality anymore.

King Louis XV once prophesied, “Apres moi, le deluge.” After me, the flood.

I’m not sure how much old King Louis cared, and his son in time lost his head to the guillotine.

You don’t know me, and you have no reason to trust me. But I am here to tell you I do care, and I believe there is still time for you to avert the flood that threatens to engulf your future. But as Mr. Lincoln understood, every generation must confront its own obligation to do what’s right even as it pays the debt for the failings of the generations that came before it.

Powerful forces are arrayed against you. You are called to demonstrate humility in a world that prizes boasting. You must be selfless in an age that glorifies self. You must cling to and champion virtue against a rising tide of iniquity. You must muster perseverance in the deed of life. You must cherish fidelity to truth and to one another.

My hopes and my small help will be with you.

Godspeed.