[commencement speech] Alan Alda @Caltech

Alan Alda’s Commencement speech to the Caltech class of 2002

Finding Feynman

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, on my days off from the Korean War, which was at that time being waged at Twentieth Century Fox in Beverly Hills, I would often come to Pasadena to visit the Rembrandts at the Norton Simon Gallery, or take a walk in the Huntington Gardens. And sometimes I would drive by Caltech and give it a glance and wonder what interesting stuff was going on in there. I had been reading about science avidly for years and I was immensely curious about how scientists went about what they did. It didn’t occur to me each time I passed by that there was one particular man in one of these buildings who at that moment might have been drawing gluon tubes on a blackboard, or playing the bongos, or just standing looking out the window as a young woman passed by—a man in whom, in a few years, I would become intensely interested.

One day, exactly 28 years ago, he was standing right here, giving the commencement address. This is the way the universe operates. First Richard Feynman gives the talk; then, 28 years later, an actor who played him on the stage gives it. This is what’s called entropy. This is what happens just before the cosmos reaches a temperature of absolute zero.

Let me tell you a little about the path that led me here. After I had read several books about Richard Feynman, I brought one of them, a charming, touching book by Ralph Leighton, called Tuva or Bust, to Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. I wondered if he thought we might be able to make a play about Feynman. He suggested Peter Parnell to write the play, and the three of us started off on a journey to find out who Richard Feynman was. We thought we’d open the play a year or so later. Instead, it took us over six years.

We had no idea how hard it would be. For one thing, he was an extremely unusual person. Toward the end of his life, he knew he was dying and he knew exactly what the most important questions were, and he knew he had a shot at answering them . . . and yet he kept to his habit of doing only what interested him.

He spent a good part of his time trying to get to this little place in the middle of Asia called Tuva, mainly because its capital was spelled with no vowels, which, for some reason, he found extremely interesting.

But, just as getting to Tuva was tantalizingly difficult for Feynman, getting to Feynman became maddeningly hard for us.

What part of him do you focus on? He helped create the atomic bomb, he helped figure out why the Challenger blew up, he understood the most puzzling questions in physics so deeply they gave him the Nobel Prize. Which facet of him do you let catch the most light? The one who was a revered teacher, a bongo player, an artist, a hilarious raconteur or a safecracker?

We wanted to make a play about Feynman, but which Feynman?

A mathematician friend of mine suggested that a central image for a play about him could be Feynman’s own idea of a sum over histories. Just as Feynman saw a photon taking every possible path on its way to your eye, Feynman himself took every possible path on his way through life. He was the sum of all his histories.

Well, nature may be smart enough to know how to average all the paths of a photon. But, we three theater people couldn’t figure out how to add up all the histories that made up Feynman. At one point, I said, “You know what we ought to do? We ought to write a play about three guys sitting around in a hotel room, trying to figure out a play about Feynman. They never figure it out. They just drive themselves crazy.”

We researched him like mad, of course. The people who knew him and worked with him and loved him here at Caltech opened their doors and their hearts to us. They were extremely generous and helpful, as we struggled to reduce this irreducible person to an evening in the theater.
I think one of the things I most hoped would come through was his honesty. He never wanted to deceive anyone, especially himself. He questioned his every assumption. And when he was talking to ordinary people with no training in physics, he never fell back on his authority as a great thinker. He felt that if he couldn’t say it in everyday words, he probably didn’t understand it himself.

I was fascinated by this in him. He knew more than most of us will ever know, and yet he insisted on speaking our language.

Like Dante in his time, he could say the most exquisitely subtle things in the language of the common people. He was an American genius, and like many American artists, he was direct and colloquial… not afraid to take a look at the ordinary, and not afraid to go deeply into it to reveal the extraordinary roots of ordinary things.

And yet, he recoiled from oversimplification. He wasn’t interested in dumbing down science… he was looking for clarity.

If he left something out, he always told you what he was leaving out, so you didn’t get a false picture of a simplicity that wasn’t there. And, later when things got more complex, you were prepared for it. He treated you, in other words, with respect.

But there was something else about him that fascinates me.

I was reading a book by Freeman Dyson the other day and a paragraph about Feynman jumped off the page at me.

“Dick was… a profoundly original scientist [Dyson says]. He refused to take anybody’s word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics . . .

He said that he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning . . .

At the end he had a version of quantum mechanics that he could understand.”

I think I saw something in this paragraph for the first time; something suddenly clicked into place. The fact that he wouldn’t take anybody’s word for anything wasn’t new to me, or that he needed to go through every step himself in order to understand it. A phrase of his has been on the blackboard behind me every night as I’ve played Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

(People have asked us why that phrase is given so much prominence in the play. It’s because the blackboard on our set contains pretty much everything that was on the final blackboard left by Feynman in his office when he died. And “What I cannot create, I do not understand” was right up there at the top.)

But what did jump out at me the other day was the phrase “he couldn’t understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks.” Now, this is Feynman we’re talking about. I suddenly had this picture in my head of Feynman going through the same experience the rest of us do . . . meeting that same blank wall half way up the mountain. I wondered. Did that give him the ability to remember what it was like to start that climb?

So, maybe it wasn’t just that he could visualize these little particles and their interactions that made him able to communicate it to the rest of us, maybe it was also that he could remember what it was like to feel dumb.

Now, here’s why I’m going on about this. It may not seem important how Feynman did it. Maybe we should just be glad he could do it and let it go at that. But I think it is important. Because, I think we have to figure out how we can do it, too.

For one thing, we live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing; we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place.

But right now, instead of reason, a lot of people are making use of wishes, dreams, mantras, and incantations. They’re trying to heal themselves using crystals, magnets, and herbs with unknown properties. People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, “Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.” But so is deadly nightshade.

Interestingly, they expect the plant to have active properties to cure them, but they’re certain it has no active properties that can harm them. How do they know that?

I mention this, not to denigrate anyone’s beliefs (I feel strongly that we’re all entitled to our beliefs, just as we’re entitled to our feelings) but I bring it up to point out that we’re in a culture that increasingly holds that science is just another belief.

And I guess it’s easier to believe something . . . anything . . . than not to know.

We don’t like uncertainty—so we gravitate back to the last comfortable solution we had—no matter how cockeyed it is.

But Feynman was comfortable with not knowing. He enjoyed it. He would proceed for a while with an idea as if he believed it was the answer. But that was only a temporary belief in order to allow himself to follow it wherever it led. Then, a little while later, he would vigorously attack the idea to see if it could stand up to every test he could think of. If it couldn’t stand up, then he simply decided he just didn’t know. “Not knowing,” he said, “is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong.”

You’re graduating today partly as Feynman’s heirs in this gloriously courageous willingness to be unsure. And just as he was heir to Newton, who was in turn heir to Galileo . . . I hope you’ll think about devoting some time to helping the rest of us become your heirs.

I’m assuming you’re here at Caltech because you love science, and I’m assuming you’ve learned a great deal here about how to do science. I’m asking you today to devote some significant part of your life to figuring out how to share your love of science with the rest of us.

But not just because explaining to us what you do will get you more funding for what you do . . . although it surely will . . . but just because you love what you do.

And while you’re explaining it, remember that dazzling us with jargon might make us sit in awe of your work, but it won’t make us love it.

Tell us frankly how you got there. If you got there by many twists and turns and blind alleys, don’t leave that out. We love a detective story. If you enjoyed the adventure of getting there, so will we.

Most scientists do leave that out. By the time we hear about their great discoveries, a lot of the doubt is gone. The mistakes and wrong turns are left out . . . and it doesn’t sound like a human thing they’ve done. It separates us from the process.

Whatever you do, help us love science the way you do.

Like the young man so head over heels about his sweetheart he can’t stop talking about her, like the young woman so in love with her young man she wants everyone to know how wonderful he is . . . show us pictures, tell us stories, make us crave to meet your beloved.

Don’t just tell us science is good for us and, therefore, we ought to fund you for it; don’t tell us to trust you that your fancy words actually mean something; don’t keep the tricks of your trade up an elite sleeve. Don’t be merchants, or mandarins, or magicians . . . be lovers!

Look, we’re accustomed in our culture to know when a commercial is coming. We know how to turn it off. But love we can’t resist.

You may be swayed by people who insist they’re only interested in hearing about the practical applications of science. You may be tempted to bend over backwards, telling them what they want to hear.

When Feynman stood here and spoke 28 years ago, he cautioned scientists against going too far in telling laypeople about the wonderful everyday applications of their work, especially if there weren’t any. He felt it wasn’t honest to pretend there was such a benefit just to get funding for your work.

It’s a powerful urge, but it’s possible to resist it.

Robert R. Wilson resisted it beautifully. Bob Wilson was a physicist who Feynman had known well. He had helped recruit Feynman for the Los Alamos project. Wilson was also an accomplished sculptor. He had a foot in each of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures.

Wilson built Fermilab, the giant atom smasher in Illinois. But at a congressional hearing in 1969, he was grilled by Senator John Pastore, who wanted to know what an atom smasher was good for. Does it in any way contribute to the security of the country?

Wilson said, “No, sir, I do not believe so. “

“It has no value in that respect?” the senator asked.

Wilson looked at him and said, “It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of people, our love of culture . . . In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country. But it has nothing to do directly with defending our country—except to help make it worth defending.”

Like Wilson, I don’t think Feynman needed to justify his curiosity about nature.
Pure science was pure pleasure. It was fun.

It’s like the story of the plate.

The one thing I was certain of from the beginning was that we had to have the story of the plate in the play. It was central. The author, Peter Parnell, would do draft after draft. And I would look at it and say, “Where’s the plate?” I drove him crazy.

The plate story is this: After the war, Feynman became depressed. His first wife had just died of tuberculosis and the realization of the awful destructive power of the bomb he had helped make had finally sunk in. He was teaching at Cornell, but he had no taste for it. He couldn’t concentrate. Then, one day, he’s in the school cafeteria and some guy starts fooling around, tossing a plate in the air. Feynman watches the design on the rim of the plate as it spins and he sees that as it spins, the plate wobbles. He gets fascinated, and he tries to figure out the relationship between the spin and the wobble. He spends months on this. And finally comes up with this complicated equation, which he shows to Hans Bethe.

And Bethe says, “That’s interesting, Feynman, but what’s the importance of it?” And Feynman says, “It has no importance, it’s just fun!”

But, see, that’s the thing—it not only brought him out of his slump, but that playful inquiry, according to Feynman, eventually led in a circuitous way to the work that won him the Nobel Prize.

But no matter where it might have led him, he made up his mind that day in the cafeteria never to work on anything that didn’t interest him, that wasn’t fun.

Of course, what Feynman was looking for was serious fun. It was the awe he felt when he looked at nature. And not just the official great wonders of nature, but any little part of nature, because any little part of it is as amazing and beautiful and complicated as the whole thing is.

So, this is interesting. I’m urging you to be like someone who I admit I’ve found to be pretty elusive.

Here I am, seven years later. And, just as Feynman never got to see Tuva, I never really found Feynman. Not really. I came close; but he was too many things. He had too many histories.

We came up with a play in QED that was immensely satisfying. It was beautifully written and beautifully directed and it gave the audience a Feynman that was as close an approximation as we could come up with. But part of me feels that a large chunk of the man is still beyond our reach—probably beyond the reach of anyone. He’s just out of sight, smiling at us. Laughing at how he put one over on us, letting us think he was just an ordinary guy. A guy we could get.

It turns out, though, that the old thing about the destination not being as valuable as the journey really is true.

Because, when we began, finding Feynman seemed important, and I guess it was . . . but as it turned out, looking for Feynman has been the fun.

Every once in a while, though, I can feel Feynman looking over my shoulder, and he’s not smiling. Like right now. I’m at the end of my talk and I feel the pressure of the words he closed his talk with 28 years ago. “One last piece of advice,” he said; “never say you’ll give a talk unless you know clearly what you’re going to talk about and more or less what you’re going to say.”

In other words, where are the brass tacks?

Okay, let me be more or less practical. I’m going to propose something to you today. I realize it’s a childish idea, something only an unschooled layperson would come up with, but it’s specific enough that it might get you thinking.

What if each of you decided to take just one thing you love about science and, no matter how complicated it is, figure out a how to make it understood by a million people? There are about 500 of you taking part in this ceremony today. If just a few of you were successful, that would make several million people a lot smarter.

How you do it is up to you. You’re clever people, and I bet you come up with some ingenious solutions. On the other hand, you may be thinking, “WHY? Why should I do this impossible thing?”

Well, I don’t know, maybe for the same reason that the birds sing.

If it does for you what it does for birds, there’s a lot to recommend it:

1) It’s a good way to improve your chances of having sex.
2) It feels good to sing.
3) Singing is the music nature makes when it dances the dance of life.

You are the universe announcing itself to itself. You open your mouth and a little muscle in your throat makes a corner of nature vibrate. You’re one part of the forest saying, “This is what I think I know,” while another part of the forest is saying, “Yeah? Well this is what I think I know!” Your chirpings are the harmony of all knowledge.

You’ve learned so much in this place about how nature works. Is there anything more beautiful than that? Is there anything greater to sing about?

So sing. Sing out. Sing. Out.

Thank you, and good luck.

[commencement speech] Wendy Kopp @Washington University

Wendy Kopp’s 2009 commencement address

Transcript of Teach For America founder’s address at Washington University’s commencement ceremony

Good morning all. It is a real privilege to be here with you. I jumped at the chance to speak at Washington University because this has become such an important place for Teach For America — you have produced some of the most inspiring and impactful leaders in our corps, alumni force and organization. I think there’s something in the water here, no doubt thanks to your own intentional practice, and I hope that the faculty and administration can reflect this morning on the difference you are making through your work.

It is also an honor to share in the accomplishment that today represents for you graduates and your families. I can only imagine the different stories of your lives, the different sorts of opportunities and challenges you have each had and faced. You should feel an incredible sense of collective accomplishment for what you have learned and what you have achieved. And as a mother of four little ones, I can only imagine how proud your parents must be. So, congratulations to all of you.

Finally, a special salute to the 25 of you who have signed up for Teach For America! We are so excited about what you will bring to our work.

I wanted to talk with you this morning about your choices at this stage of your lives — about where you decide to channel your energy as you progress over the coming two or three or five years. Because I feel like I lucked into my life path, and I wish someone had told me before what I know now since things of such consequence are not best left to chance.

When I was sitting in your seats at another good school now 20 years ago, I was about to embark on a real adventure. I had become obsessed with the idea that our country should be recruiting our most talented and driven among us to teach in our nation’s highest poverty communities just as aggressively as we were being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street. I believed that the inequity in educational outcomes that persisted along socioeconomic and racial lines in our country was among our greatest injustices, that the leaders in our generation were searching for something they weren’t finding and would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural public schools, that our energy and idealism would make a difference in the lives of the nation’s most disadvantaged kids, and that ultimately our nation would be a different place if as many of its leaders had taught in low-income communities straight out of college as had worked on Wall Street straight out of college.

Well, because my letter to the President of the United States suggesting that he create a national teacher corps for all of those reasons got in the wrong stack and resulted in a job rejection letter from the White House, and because I possessed at the time an uncommon share of naïveté, I decided to create Teach For America myself. Thankfully, it was an idea that would quickly magnetize hundreds of people who were drawn to the core beliefs and values it represented. So one year after I graduated from college, I was looking out on an auditorium full of 500 recent college graduates who were about to embark on their training and on their two-year commitment to Teach For America.

If someone had asked me at the time if this was going to be my life’s work, I would have shuddered at the question. Not because I had anything else in mind, but because, to me, life consisted entirely of the next two years. It was inconceivable that one day I would be 40-something — that only happened to other people. Yet, 20 years later, I am still here. And I am not alone. Most of the Teach For America corps members who sign up for two years are still in this work in one way or another. Why?

There’s a second-year Teach For America corps member here in St. Louis named Colleen Dunn, who has started her school years by talking with her first graders about their favorite gifts. Everyone in the class goes around in a circle and shares the favorite gift that they have ever received, and then she asks them to close their eyes and imagine what would happen and how they would feel if they lost their favorite gift. And then she shares with her students her favorite gift. She tells them that it is her education because no one can ever take that from her since it is kept safe inside her head.

In America, in this country that aspires so admirably to be a land of equal opportunity, we don’t give all of our nation’s children this gift. Here in St. Louis Public Schools, where 80 percent of students are living below the poverty line and 84 percent are kids of color, would you believe that 16 percent of our children are meeting state standards in math, 19 percent in reading and writing? That means that out of 26,000 kids in Wash. U.’s backyard, about 4,000 have the math skills the state thinks are critical for kids of their age.

And, yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. When Colleen’s first graders arrived in her classroom in her first year, her students didn’t know their letters, didn’t know corresponding sounds, they didn’t possess basic concepts about print such as the ability to differentiate a letter from a word. At the end of the school year, after nine months of days that began for Colleen at 4:30 in the morning and ended with her falling asleep over grading papers, lesson planning, writing parent newsletters, her students had made two years of progress in reading and math. The students who had started out so far behind were ready to enter second grade ahead of average second graders.

Judging from Colleen’s example, the achievement gap doesn’t need to exist — it wasn’t that the kids couldn’t do the work, but rather that they simply needed access to the opportunities they deserved. Perhaps, we might wonder, it was because they were first graders.

Well, at the other end of the educational spectrum we have Anna McNulty, another Teach For America corps member here in St. Louis who is now in her third year of teaching English in high school. In St. Louis, about 10 percent of students will enter college from the communities that we’re working in; 80 percent of those who do will need remediation when they get there. Anna created an Advanced Placement class for her students and set out to ensure that the seniors she taught would go to college and wouldn’t need remediation when they got there. While she selected students who were most prepared to tackle AP work, her students were nonetheless performing on average at a high sophomore/early junior year level when they entered her room their senior year. After a year of extraordinarily hard work, of reading the likes of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Kafka, working harder in school than they ever had before, her students had made two years of progress and were ready to enter college, on average, reading at a college freshman year level. Most would need no remediation.

Anna describes entering Teach For America as a philosophy major with an intention to teach for two years before entering a career in academia. But, as she says, “This wound up being my future.” Why are so many of us making this our life’s work? Because we’ve seen the magnitude of the problem and the consequences of it, yes, but mostly because we’ve learned that it doesn’t need to exist. This is a solvable problem.

I was struck a couple of year ago to hear Muhammad Yunus’ message when he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work pioneering and spreading the idea of microcredit — giving loans to poor people without any financial security. His message, after three decades of using this approach to address poverty, was that he firmly believes we can eliminate poverty. “I strongly believe,” he said, “that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to. In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. …”

Now, most of us view poverty as a massive and daunting problem — a problem we are unlikely to solve in our lifetimes. But Muhammad Yunus deeply believes, based on his work in understanding its causes and solutions, that we can in fact eliminate poverty in our lifetimes.

The reason his message struck me so powerfully is that it’s so consistent with what we have learned and seen firsthand about educational inequity. We can solve it.

For all of us who have attained the gift of excellent educations and the opportunities that result, it is so easy to isolate ourselves from the inequities that persist in our nation and our world. We cannot let this happen because of their magnitude and the consequence for individuals and communities and society and all of us, and especially because of the evidence that these are solvable problems. Because if we can solve them, we must. If educational inequity, or poverty, is solvable, it is the moral responsibility of those of us who have been given so much to do everything in our power to realize that change.

Now, I imagine that for many there is a temptation to assume that you will address the world’s problems later — after you have families or make millions or gain skills and experience. But there are two big reasons to dive in early — now — which I hope you will consider.

The first is that the world needs your inexperience. There is something about the fresh perspective, the naïveté, the limitless energy that comes along with youth and inexperience that enables recent graduates to solve problems that many more experienced people have given up on.

People want to know how I started Teach For America straight out of college, and honestly, my greatest asset was my inexperience. It proved absolutely critical at many junctures. When I declared in my thesis that I would try to create this corps myself, my thesis adviser pronounced me “deranged.” When he looked at my budget of $2.5 million for the first year, he asked me if I knew how hard it was to raise $2,500, let alone two and a half million dollars. But aided by my inexperience, I was unfazed by these reactions. When school district officials literally laughed at the notion that the Me Generation — this was the label for my generation — would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural communities, their concerns, too, went unheard. My very greatest asset was that I simply did not understand what was impossible.

I see this same phenomenon every day as I watch 22-year-olds walking into classrooms and setting goals for themselves and their students that most believe to be entirely unrealistic. Despite the conventional wisdom that there is only so much that schools can do to overcome the challenges of poverty, individuals like Alicia Herald, who graduated from Wash. U. in 2005, have naively aspired to put their students on a level playing field.

When Alicia left here to teach fourth grade in South Central Los Angeles, she spent her summer reading Harry Potter because her fourth grade teacher told her that was what fourth graders read. But when she met her fourth graders, they were reading Dr. Seuss. They were reading on a first-grade level. Alicia set out to change that. When the school principal saw her goals posted in her room — for example, a goal that the kids would master fourth-grade math standards by the end of the year — she took Alicia aside and counseled her to take down the goals, for fear that her students might be disappointed if they didn’t reach them. But Alicia naively thought it would be fine. When the principal set a school-wide goal that 50 percent of the parents would sign their students’ report cards as a sign of their engagement in their children’s education, Alicia asked, why not 100 percent? Well, at the end of the year, with 100 percent of her students’ parents signing report cards and after extraordinary effort — including bringing her students together on Saturdays and for after-school tutoring — her students achieved their goal of mastering fourth-grade math standards and they made two years of progress in reading. One year later, 100 percent of parents were signing those report cards not only in her class but in 17 of the school’s 22 classrooms.

Over and over, I see young, inexperienced teachers making a huge difference by setting big goals for themselves that others would deem crazy. So one reason not to wait to address the world’s biggest problems is that they need your attention before you accept the status quo, before you are plagued by the knowledge of what is “impossible.”

The second reason to engage in addressing the world’s biggest problems early is because solving them takes time.

Ed Chang, who graduated from here in 1997, entered teaching and education unsuspecting that it would be his life’s work. Twelve years ago, he was pre-med, graduating with a double major in biology and psychology. Having grown up in a middle class background, unaware of the disparities in education, he described the complete shock of his initial days in the classroom in Atlanta, when he realized that he had one microscope and one scale to teach life sciences to 150 seventh graders, the majority of whom were reading on a fourth- or fifth-grade level and who apparently had never had exposure to science before at all. Ed set out to change things for his kids — he applied for and received a $17,000 grant at the end of his first year in order to build a curriculum based on hands-on field study and laboratory research (again we see the power of naïveté and inexperience). But as Ed turned his kids onto science and built their skills, it became harder and harder to leave even after his two-year commitment was up because students kept coming back and over time there were more and more students who needed his support. And then, when he saw his original group of students — his 150 students — graduate from high school, he actually saw only 15 of them walk across the stage and graduate, and he realized at that point that he would have to do more. At that moment, he knew he would need to run a whole school. And so this coming July, he will open the doors of KIPP Strive Academy in Atlanta to his first class of 95 fifth graders. With time and the foundation that working successfully with students has given him, Ed is now going to have the chance to literally solve the problem of educational inequity for the students in his community.

Similarly, Glenn Davis graduated from Wash. U. in 2003 with a double major in social thought and analysis and international business. After teaching seventh grade in the South Bronx, fellow Teach For America alums recruited him back to the Midwest to be part of an effort to change things for kids in one of the highest-poverty, most crime-ridden areas in the U.S., in Gary, Indiana. He works at a KIPP school there created by fellow alumni. Last year, the school’s fifth graders entered the year at the 25th percentile against the national norm. They entered the school last year. In reading, they were at the 19th percentile. At the end of the year, they had moved from the 25th to the 44th percentile in math, from the 19th to 39th percentile in reading. Three more middle school years like that and his school’s students will literally have different life prospects. Now Glenn is training to start the high school these middle schoolers will enter. I asked him if he ever would have thought when he was graduating seven years ago that he would be starting a high school today and he laughed as if it would be entirely inconceivable. But thank heavens that he dove in early because now he’s going to have years and years to change what’s possible for kids in Gary, Indiana, and maybe beyond.

I said earlier that Teach For America wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my inexperience, and at the same time, it wouldn’t fulfill its potential without time and experience. Two decades ago, as I was getting started in this, there was a hit movie — maybe some of you remember it — called “Stand and Deliver.” You remember that movie? It made a hero out of a teacher, Jaime Escalante, who coached a class in South Central Los Angeles to pass the Advanced Placement calculus exam. At that time, it seemed so stunning that a teacher could get kids in a high-poverty community to excel at that level that we made a movie out of that teacher. At that time, I don’t think we could have found a school in a high-poverty community that was putting a whole building full of kids on a track to graduating from college at the same rate as kids in high-income communities.

Today, we know of thousands of teachers in urban and rural communities all over the country who are proving that their students can excel academically — teachers like Colleen, Anna, Alicia, Ed and Glenn — and there are thought to be 200-such schools, schools like those in the KIPP Network, and others such as YES College Prep in Houston and IDEA Academy in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley — schools started by our alumni that are literally among the top 100 high schools in the country according to U.S. News & World Report. In the two decades I’ve been at this, it is true that we have still not yet narrowed the achievement gap in an aggregate sense. And, yet, things are so very different today. The question we’re asking has changed. It is no longer “Can we do this?” but rather now it is “Can we do this at scale?”

And even to that question, some communities are giving us real evidence of the possibility of system-wide change. From Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to New York City, school systems are closing achievement gaps in significant, measurable ways. If you go to these communities, it is impossible to miss the fact that a big part of what is moving the needle is a bunch of talented, committed teachers, school leaders, district administrators, and community leaders who learned through their experiences teaching in Teach For America that it is possible to solve this problem and what it will take to solve it.

So while I may have shuddered at the thought of spending 20 years in any one endeavor when I was graduating, now I feel incredibly lucky to have happened upon this so early that we stand the chance to actually solve the problem we’re addressing. This year, more of our nation’s future leaders will join Teach For America than came into this effort in the entire first decade of our work. Five years from now, we will have around 50,000 corps members and alumni across the country. Ten years from now, we will have more than 80,000. At this scale, with a critical mass of leaders in communities across the country — working at every level of the education system and supporting the work at every level of policy and from every professional sector — we will be moving the needle against the achievement gap in an aggregate sense.

A couple of years ago, Bill Gates gave a commencement speech in which he shared his regret with his professors at Harvard — which he attended for one year — that he hadn’t been exposed to societal inequities earlier so that he would have had time to truly solve them. Colleen, Anna, Alicia, Ed and Glenn, and all of you, have that chance.

So as you head out today I hope you will reflect on the extent of disparities in our world, on the fact that those who have spent their lives addressing them inevitably come to see their solvability, on the enormous assets that you possess due to your youth and inexperience, and on the kind of long-term, sustained commitment necessary to see through the complexity of the problems and have a chance at actually solving them. If you’ve already matriculated to grad school or signed up with another pursuit, seize the opportunity of those learning experiences but remember one or two or three years down the line the contribution you can make by channeling your energy against the disparities in our world.

As I said earlier, I feel so lucky to have landed in this pursuit. I have spent not one minute of my last 20 years searching for what I really wanted to be doing, because I happened into something that, while exhausting and challenging, is unbelievably fulfilling. I wish you the same good fortune. Thank you.

[speech] Mother Jones @Charleston West Virginia

Mother Jones Speaks to Striking Coal Miners

Charleston WV

August 15, 1912

This, my friends, marks, in my estimation, the most remarkable move ever made in the State of West Virginia. It is a day that will mark history in the long ages to come. What is it? It is an uprising of the oppressed against the master class.

From this day on, my friends, Virginia — West Virginia — shall march in the front of the Nation’s States. To me, I think, the proper thing to do is to read the purpose of our meeting here today — why these men have laid down their tools, why these men have come to the statehouse.

[Jones reads from letter]

To His Excellency
WILLIAM E. GLASSCOCK,
Governor of the State of West Virginia:

It is respectfully represented unto your excellency that the owners of the various coal mines doing business along the valley of Cabin Creek, Kanawha County, W. Va., are maintaining and have at present in their employ a large force of armed guards, armed with Winchesters, a dangerous and deadly weapon; also having in their possession three Gatling guns, which they have stationed at commanding positions overlooking the Cabin Creek Valley, which said weapons said guards use for the purpose of browbeating, intimidating, and menacing the lives of all the citizens who live in said valley, who are not in accord with the management of the coal companies, which guards are cruel, and their conduct toward the citizens is such that it would be impossible to give a detailed account of.

Therefore, suffice it to say, however, that they beat, abuse, maim, and hold up citizens without process of law; deny freedom of speech, a provision guaranteed by the Constitution; deny the citizens the right to assemble in a peaceable manner for the purpose of discussing questions in which they are concerned. Said guards also hold up a vast body of laboring men who live at the mines, and so conduct themselves that a great number of men, women, and children live in a state of constant fear, unrest, and dread. We hold that the stationing of said guards along the public highways and public places is a menace to the general welfare of the State. That such action on the part of the companies in maintaining such guards is detrimental to the best interests of society and an outrage against the honor and dignity of the State of West Virginia.

[Interrupted by loud applause.]

As citizens interested in the public weal and general welfare, and believing that law and order and peace should ever abide, that the spirit of brotherly love and justice and freedom should everywhere exist, we must tender our petition that you would bring to bear all the powers of your office as chief executive of this State for purpose of disarming said guards and restoring to the citizens of said valley all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and said State.

In duty bound, in behalf of the miners of the State of West Virginia.

[Jones puts down the letter.]

I want to say, with all due respect to the Governor — I want to say to you that the Governor will not, can not, do anything, for this reason: The governor was placed in this building by Scott and Elkins, and he don’t dare oppose them. Therefore you are asking the governor of the State to do something that he can not do without betraying the class he belongs to.

I remember the Governor in a state, when Grover Cleveland was perched in the White House — Grover Cleveland said he would send the federal troops out [to protect the miners], and the Governor of that state said, “Will you? If you do, I will meet your federal troops with the state troops, and we will have it out.” Old Grover never sent the troops; he took back water…

You see, my friends, how quickly the Governor sent his militia when the coal operators got scared to death…

They wouldn’t keep their dog where they keep you fellows. You know that. They have a good place for their dogs and a slave to take care of them. The mine owners’ wives will take the dogs up, and say, “I love you, dea-h” [imitating a mine owner's wife]. My friends the day for petting dogs is gone; the day for raising children to a nobler manhood and better womanhood is here! You have suffered; I know you have suffered. I was with you nearly three years in this State. I went to jail. I went to the Federal courts, but I never took any back water! I still unfurl the red flag of industrial freedom; no tyrant’s face shall you know, and I call you today into that freedom — long perch on the bosom —

[Interrupted by applause.]

I am back again to find you, my friends, in a state of industrial peonage…

We will prepare for the job, just like Lincoln and Washington did. We took lessons from them, and we are here to prepare for the job.

Well, when I came out on the public road [to get to the rally] the superintendent — you know the poor salary slave — he came out and told me that there were notaries public there, and a squire — one had a peg leg — and the balance had pegs in their skulls!

[Laughter]

They forbid me speaking on the highway, and said that if I didn’t discontinue I would be arrested.

Well, I want to tell you one thing, I don’t run into jail, but when the bloodhounds undertake to put me in jail I will go there. I have gone there. I would have had the little peg-leg squire arrest me, only I knew this meeting was going to be pulled off to-day, to let the world know what was going on in West Virginia. When I get through with them, by the Eternal God, they will be glad to let me alone.

I am not afraid of jails. We [will] build jails, and when we get ready, we will put them behind the bars!…

Now, brothers, not in all the history of the labor movement have I got such an inspiration as I have got from you here to-day. Your banners are history; they will go down to the future ages, to the children unborn, to tell them the slave has risen, children must be free.

The labor movement was not originated by man. The labor movement, my friends, was a command from God Almighty. He commanded the prophets thousands of years ago to go down and redeem the Israelites that were in bondage, and he organized the men into a union and went to work. And they said, “The masters have made us gather straw; they have been more cruel than they were before. What are we going to do?” The prophet said, “A voice from heaven has come down to get you together.” They got together and the prophet led them out of the land of bondage and robbery and plunder into the land of freedom. And when the army of the pirates followed them the Dead Sea opened and swallowed them up, and for the first time the workers were free.

And so it is. That can well be applied to the State of West Virginia…

I hope, my friends, that you and the mine owners will put aside the breach and get together before I leave the State. But I want to say, make no settlement until they sign up that every bloody murderer of a guard has got to go. This is done, my friends, beneath the flag our fathers fought and bled for, and we don’t intend to surrender our liberty.

I have a document issued 18 years ago telling how they must handle the labor movement — pat them on the back; make them believe that they were your devoted friends. I hold that document, taken from their statement in Washington. It plainly states, “We have got to crucify them, but we have got to do it cunningly.” And they have been doing it cunningly…

Oh you men of wealth! Oh you preachers! You are going over to China and sending money over there for Jesus. For God’s sake, keep it at home; we need it. Let me tell you, them fellows are owned body and soul by the ruling class, and they would rather take a year in hell with Elkins than ninety-nine in heaven. Do you find a minister preaching against the guards? He will preach about Jesus, but not about the guards.

When we were crossing the bridge at [the] Washington [coal mines] the bloodhounds were at the company store. The bloodhounds might have thrown me into the river and I wouldn’t have known it. The [miners] were hollering “Police! Police!” I said, “What is the matter with you?” They said, “Oh God! Murder! Murder!” Another [miner] came out, and his feet never touched the sidewalk.

My boys came running to me and said, “Oh, Mother, they are killing the boys…” I said, “Call them boys here.” Then [the guards left]; they thought I had an army with me. Then I picked up a boy streaming with blood where the hounds had beat him.

You are to blame. You have voted for the whole gang of commercial pirates every time you get a chance to free yourselves. It is time to clean them up…

If your sheriff had done his duty as a citizen of this State and according to his oath, he would have disarmed the guards and then there would have been no more trouble. Just make me governor for one month. I won’t ask for a sheriff or policeman, and I will do business, and there won’t be a guard [remaining] in the State of West Virginia. The mine owners won’t take 69,000 pounds of coal in dockage off of you fellows. Sixty-nine thousand pounds of coal they docket you for, and a few pounds of slate, and then they give to Jesus on Sunday.

They give your missionary women a couple of hundred dollars and rob you under pretense of giving to Jesus. Jesus never sees a penny of it, and never heard of it. They use it for the women to get a jag on and then go and hollow for Jesus. I wish I was God Almighty! I would throw down some night from heaven and get rid of the whole blood-sucking bunch!

I want to show you here that the average wages you fellows get in this country is $500 a year. Before you get a thing to eat there is $20 taken out a month, which leaves about $24 a month. Then you go to the “pluck-me” stores and want to get something to eat for your wife, and you are off that day, and the child comes back and says, “Papa, I can’t get anything.”

“Why,” he says, “there is $4 coming to me?”

The child says, “they said there was nothing coming to you.” And the child goes back crying without a mouthful of anything to eat. The father goes to the “pluck-me” store and says to the manager, “there is $4 coming to me,” and the manager says, “Oh, no, we have kept that for rent. You are charged $6 a month, and there are only three days gone, [and there] is a rule that two-thirds of the rent is to be kept if there is only one day.”

That is honesty? Do you wonder these women starve? Do you wonder at this uprising? And you fellows have stood it entirely too long! It is time now to put a stop to it! We will give the Governor until to-morrow night to take them guards out of Cabin Creek.

Here on the steps of the Capitol of West Virginia…I want to tell you that the Governor will get until tomorrow night, Friday night, to get rid of his bloodhounds, and if they are not gone, we will get rid of them!

Aye men, aye men, inside of this building, aye women, come with me and see the horrible pictures, see the horrible condition the ruling class has put these women in. Aye, they destroy women. Look at those little children, the rising generation, yes, look at the little ones, yes, look at the women assaulted…I have worked, boys, I have worked with you for years. I have seen the suffering children, and, in order to be convinced, I went into the mines on the night shift and day shift and helped the poor wretches to load coal at times. We lay down at noon, and we took our lunches, and we talked our wrongs over. We gathered together at night and asked, “how will we remedy things?” We organized secretly and, after a while, held public meetings. We got our people together in those organized states…I don’t care about your woman suffrage and the temperance brigade or any other of you class associations, I want women of the coming day to discuss and find out the cause of child crucifixion, that is what I want to find out.

I have worked in the factories of Georgia and Alabama, and these bloodhounds were tearing the hands off of children and working them 14 hours a day until I fought for them. They made them put up every Saturday money for missionary work in China. I know what I am talking about. I am not talking haphazard, I have the goods.

Go down, men of to-day, who rob and exploit, go down into hell and look at the ruins you have put there, look at the jails. We pay $6,000,000 a year to chain men like demons in a bastille — and we call ourselves civilized. Six million dollars a year we pay for jails, and nothing for education.

I have been to jail more than once, and I expect to go again. If you [addressing crowd] are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, actually to the Lord you ought, just to see one old woman who is not afraid of all the bloodhounds. How scared those villains are when one woman 80 years old, with her head grey, can come in and scare hell out of the whole bunch! We didn’t scare them? The mine owners run down the street like a mad dog today.

They ask who started this thing. I started it, I did it, and I am not afraid to tell you if you are here, and I will start more before I leave West Virginia. I started this mass today, I had these banners written, and don’t accuse anybody else of this job.

It is freedom or death, and your children will be free. We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation, and I want to say to you that the next generation will not charge us for what we’ve done; they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone.

…Yes; we have no fears of them at all. I was put out at 12 o’clock at night — and landed with 5 cents in my pocket — by seven bayonets in the State of Colorado. The Governor told me — he is a corporation rat, you know — he told me never to come back. A man is a fool, if he is a Governor, to tell a woman not to do a thing. I went back the next day, and I have been back since to fight, and he hasn’t bothered me. He has learned it won’t do to tamper with women of the right metal!…

Now, my boys, you are mine; we have fought together, we have hungered together, we have marched together, but I can see victory in the Heavens for you. I can see the hand above you guiding and inspiring you to move onward and upward. No white flag — we can not raise it; we must not raise it. We must redeem the world!

Go into our factories, see how the conditions are there, see how women are ground up for the merciless money pirates, see how many of the poor wretches go to work with crippled bodies.

I talked with a mother who had her small children working. She said to me, “Mother, they are not of age, but I had to say they were; I had to tell them they were of age so they could get a chance to help me to get something to eat.” She said after they were there for a little while, “I have saved $40, the first I ever saw. I put that into a cow and we had some milk for the little ones.” In all the years her husband had put in the earth digging out wealth, he never got a glimpse of $40 until he had to take his infant boys, that ought to go to school, and sacrifice them.

If there was no other reason that should stimulate every man and woman to fight this damnable system of commercial pirates. That alone should do it, my friends.

Is there a committee here? I want to take a committee of the well-fed fellows and well-dressed fellows; I want to present this to the Governor. Be very polite. Don’t get on your knees. Get off your knees and stand up. None of these fellows are better than you, they are only flesh and blood — that is the truth…

I will give the press a copy of this resolution and this petition, that was given to the Governor.

Now, my boys…I am going up Cabin Creek. I am going to hold meetings there. I am going to claim the right of an American citizen.

I was on this earth before these operators were. I was in this country before these operators. I have been 74 years under this flag. I have got the right to talk. I have seen its onward march. I have seen the growth of oppression, and I want to say to you, my friends, I am going to claim my right as a citizen of this Nation, I won’t violate the law; I will not kill anybody or starve anybody; but I will talk unsparingly of all the corporation bloodhounds we can bring to jail.

I have no apologies to offer. I have seen your children murdered; I have seen you blown to death in the mines, and there was no redress. A fellow in Colorado says, “Why don’t you prop the mines?” The operator said, “Oh, hell; Dagoes are cheaper than props!” Every miner is a Dago with the blood-sucking pirates, and they are cheaper than props, because if they kill a hundred of you, well, it was your fault; there must be a mine inspector kept there.

The night before the little Johnson boys were killed the mine inspector — John Laing is the mine owner; he wouldn’t inspect them — the mine inspector went there and said the mines are propped securely. The next morning the little Johnson children went to work, and when they were found, their hands were clasped in their dinner buckets with two biscuits.

You work for Laing day after day! He is a mine inspector, but he wouldn’t be if I had anything to say about it. He would take a back seat!

Boys, I want to say to you, obey the law. Let me say to the Governor and let me say to the mine owners — let me say to all people — that I will guarantee there will be no destruction of property. In the first place, that is our property. It is inside where our jobs are. We have every reason to protect it. In the mines is where our jobs are. We are not out to destroy property; we are out to preserve and protect property, and I will tell you why. We are going to get more wages, and we are going to stop the docking system! Put that down [Jones points to a reporter in the crowd]. Your day for docking is done! …If they don’t stop it, we will!

We’ll take care of the property; there will be no property destroyed. Not a bit; and if you want your property protected these miners will protect it for you, and they won’t need a gun.

We will protect it at the risk of our lives. I know the miners; I have marched with 10,000 — 20,000 — and destroyed no property. We had 20,000 miners in Pennsylvania, but destroyed no property… I will tell you why we are not going to destroy your property, Mr. Governor: Because one of these days we are going to take over the mines. That is what we are going to do; we are going to take over those mines.

The Government has a mine in North Dakota. It works eight hours — not a minute more. There are no guards, no police, no militia. The men make $125 a month, and there is never any trouble at that mine. Uncle Sam is running the job, and he is a pretty good mine inspector…

I want you to listen a moment. I want the business men to listen. You business men are up against it. There is a great revolution going on in the industrial world. The Standard Oil Company owns 86 great department stores in this country. The small business man is beginning to be eliminated. He has got to get down, he can’t get up. It is like Carnegie said before the Tariff Commission in Washington. “Gentlemen, I am not bothered about tariff on steel rails.” He says, “what concerns me and my class is the right to organize.” …Carnegie said that in a few years, he went into the business with $5,000; he took $7,500. He said he knew the time was ripe for steel bridges, and he went into it. He closed out his interest for $300,000,000.

Do you wonder that the steel workers are robbed? When one thief alone can take $300,000,000 and give to a library — to educate our skulls because you didn’t get a chance to educate them yourselves.

A fellow said, “I don’t think we ought to take those libraries.” Yes, take them, and let him build libraries in every town in the country. It is your money. Yet he comes and constructs those libraries as living monuments reddened with the blood of men, women, and children that he robbed.

How did he make $300,000,000? Come with me to Homestead, and I will show you the graves reddened with the blood of men, women, and children. That is where we fixed the Pinkertons, and they have never rose from that day to this. And we will fix the Baldwins in West Virginia. The Pinkertons were little poodle dogs for the operators. We will fix the Baldwins just the same…

Senator Dick said, when I met him, “I am delighted to see you, ‘Mother’ Jones.” I said, “I am not delighted to see you.” He said, “What is the matter?” I said, “You have passed the Dick military bill to shoot my class down, that is why I wouldn’t shake hands with you.” That is the way to do business with those fellows. All the papers in the country wrote it up, and he was knocked down off his perch. I will knock a few of these Senators down before I die!

[Applause]

…Be good; don’t drink, only a glass of beer.

The parasite blood-suckers will tell you not to drink beer, because they want to drink it all, you know. They are afraid to tell you to drink for fear there will not be enough for their carcass.

[Someone from the crowd cries "the Governor drinks champagne!"]

He needs it. He gets it from you fellows. He ought to drink it. You pay for it, and as long as he can get it for nothing, any fellow would be a fool not to drink it…

I want you to keep the peace until I tell you to move, and when I want you every one will come. Now, be good. I don’t tell you to go and work for Jesus. Work for yourselves; work for bread. That is the fight we have got. Work for bread. They own our bread.

This fight that you are in is the great industrial revolution that is permeating the heart of men over the world. They see behind the clouds the star that rose in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago, that is bringing the message of a better and nobler civilization. We are facing the hour. We are in it, men, the new day; we are here facing that star that will free men and give to the Nation a nobler, grander, higher, truer, purer, better manhood. We are standing on the eve of that mighty hour when the motherhood of the Nation will rise, and instead of clubs and picture shows or excursions, she will devote her life to the training of the human mind, giving to the Nation great men and great women.

I see that hour. I see the star breaking your chains…

I know of the wrongs of humanity; I know your aching backs; I know your swimming heads; I know your little children suffer; I know your wives. I have gone in and found her dead and found the babe nursing at the dead breast, and found the little girl 11 years old taking care of three children. She said, “Mother, will you wake up, baby is hungry and crying?” When I laid my hand on mamma she breathed her last. And the child of 11 had to become a mother to the children.

Oh, men [speaking of mine owners], have you any hearts? Oh, men, do you feel? Oh, men, do you see the judgment day on the throne above, when you will be asked, “where did you get your gold?”

You stole it from these wretches. You murdered, you assassinated, you starved, you burned them to death, that you and your wives might have palaces, and that your wives might go to the seashore. Oh God, men, when I see the horrible picture, when I see the children with their hands off, when I took an army of babies and walked a hundred and thirty miles with a petition to the President of the United States, to pass a bill in Congress to keep these children from being murdered for profit. He had a secret service then all the way to the palace. And now they want to [re-elect] that man! What is the American Nation coming to?

Manhood, womanhood, can you stand for it? They put reforms in their platforms, but [we] get no reform. [Roosevelt] promised everything to labor. When we had the strike in Colorado he sent 200 guns to blow our brains out. I don’t forget. You do, but I don’t. And our women were kicked out like dogs at the point of the bayonet. That is America. They don’t do it in Russia. Some women get up with $5 worth of paint on their cheeks and have tooth brushes for their dogs and say, “oh, them horrible miners. Oh, that horrible old Mother Jones, that horrible old woman.”

I am horrible! I admit, and I want to be to you blood-sucking pirates!

I want you, my boys, to buckle on your armor. This is a fighting age; this is not the age for cowards; put them out of the way. Take your medicine [Governor], because we are going to get after you, no doubt about it.

[Cries from the crowd "Give it to them!"]

Yes, I will.

[Cries again "Give it to them!"]

I want you to be good. Give the Governor time until to-morrow night, and, if he don’t act then it is up to you. We have all-day Saturday, all-day Sunday, all-day Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday if we need it.

We are used to living on little; we can take a crust of bread in our hands and go.

Boys, stay quiet until tomorrow night. I think it would be a good thing to work tomorrow, because the mine owners will need it. The mine commissioner will get a pain in his skull to-night and his wife will give him some “dope.” The mine owner’s wife is away at the seashore. When she finds no more money coming she will say, “ss there any more money coming?” He will say, “most of the miners are not working.” She will say, “take the guards and shoot them back into the mines, those horrible fellows.”

The Governor says, if you don’t go to work, said he, in the mines or on the railroads, I am going to call the militia, and I will shoot you…I said we can get ready too.

What militia can you get to fight us? Those boys on Paint Creek wouldn’t fight us if all the governors in the country wanted you to. I was going yesterday to take dinner with them, but I had something else to do. I am going some day to take dinner with them, and I will convert the whole bunch to my philosophy. I will get them all my way.

Now, be good, boys.

[Jones reaches for a hat in the crowd.]

Pass the hat around, some of these poor devils want a glass of beer. Get the hat. The mine owner robs them. Get a hat you fellows of the band…

Another thing I want you to do: I want you to go in regular parade, three or four together. The moving-picture man wants to get your picture to send over the country.

[Someone in the crowd asks what the collection is being taken for.]

The hat is for miners who came up here broke, and they want to get a glass of beer. And to pay their way back — and to get a glass of beer. I will give you $5. Get a move on, and get something in it…

The National Government will get a record of this meeting. They will say, my friends, this was a peaceful, law-abiding meeting. They will see men of intelligence, that they are not out to destroy but to build. And instead of the horrible homes you have got we will build on their ruins homes for you and your children to live in, and we will build them on the ruins of the dog kennels which they wouldn’t keep their mules in. That will bring forth better ideas than the world has had. The day of oppression will be gone. I will be with you whether true or false. I will be with you at midnight or when the battle rages, when the last bullet ceases, but I will be in my joy, as an old saint said:

O, God, of the mighty clan, God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a man. God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a fighting man.

[Senator Charles Dick (R-OH), Chairman of the Committee on Militia and member of the Mines & Mining Committee, introduced legislation in 1902 to increase the size of state militia, which had been used by governors of several states to break strikes forcibly and quell labor disturbances.]

[commencement speech] Dennis Lehane @UMass

Dennis Lehane @ UMass, 2004

[commencement speech] Mike Judge @UCSD

Mike Judge @UCSD

Maker of “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill”

Ain’t I a Woman? – Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?
Delivered 1851
Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

Every Man a King – Huey Long

Huey P. Long

Every Man a King

Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men that is by 120,000,000 people?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have only 30 minutes in which to speak to you this evening, and I, therefore, will not be able to discuss in detail so much as I can write when I have all of the time and space that is allowed me for the subjects, but I will undertake to sketch them very briefly without manuscript or preparation, so that you can understand them so well as I can tell them to you tonight.

I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult problem to solve in America, and that is the view of nearly everyone with whom I have discussed the matter here in Washington and elsewhere throughout the United States — that we have no very difficult problem to solve.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country — and by rich people I mean the super-rich — will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

We have a marvelous love for this Government of ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it is well that it should be, because we have a splendid form of government and we have a splendid set of laws. We have everything here that we need, except that we have neglected the fundamentals upon which the American Government was principally predicated.

How may of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights of the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”

Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all me were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?

Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal of “That we hold that all men are created equal.”

Now was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable — the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?

Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling the fact that all people are created equal; when we have today in America thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear? I do not think you will contend that, and I do not think for a moment that they will contend it.

Now let us see if we cannot return this Government to the Declaration of Independence and see if we are going to do anything regarding it. Why should we hesitate or why should we quibble or why should we quarrel with one another to find out what the difficulty is, when we know what the Lord told us what the difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a blind man could see it, then Jesus told us all about it, and it was later written in the Book of James, where everyone could read it?

I refer to the Scriptures, now, my friends, and give you what it says not for the purpose of convincing you of the wisdom of myself, not for the purpose ladies and gentlemen, of convincing you of the fact that I am quoting the Scripture means that I am to be more believed than someone else; but I quote you the Scripture, rather refer you to the Scripture, because whatever you see there you may rely upon will never be disproved so long as you or your children or anyone may live; and you may further depend upon the fact that not one historical fact that the Bible has ever contained has ever yet been disproved by any scientific discovery or by reason of anything that has been disclosed to man through his own individual mind or through the wisdom of the Lord which the Lord has allowed him to have.

But the Scripture says, ladies and gentlemen, that no country can survive, or for a country to survive it is necessary that we keep the wealth scattered among the people, that nothing should be held permanently by any one person, and that 50 years seems to be the year of jubilee in which all property would be scattered about and returned to the sources from which it originally came, and every seventh year debt should be remitted.

Those two things the Almighty said to be necessary — I should say He knew to be necessary, or else He would not have so prescribed that the property would be kept among the general run of the people and that everyone would continue to share in it; so that no one man would get half of it and hand it down to a son, who takes half of what was left, and that son hand it down to another one, who would take half of what was left, until, like a snowball going downhill, all of the snow was off of the ground except what the snowball had.

I believe that was the judgment and the view and the law of the Lord, that we would have to distribute wealth every so often, in order that there could not be people starving to death in a land of plenty, as there is in America today. We have in American today more wealth, more goods, more food, more clothing, more houses than we have ever had. We have everything in abundance here. We have the farm problem, my friends, because we have too much cotton, because we have too much wheat, and have too much corn, and too much potatoes.

We have a home-loan problem because we have too many houses, and yet nobody can buy them and live in them.

We have trouble, my friends, in the country, because we have too much money owing, the greatest indebtedness that has ever been given to civilization, where it has been shown that we are incapable of distributing to the actual things that are here, because the people have not money enough to supply themselves with them, and because the greed of a few men is such that they think it is necessary that they own everything, and their pleasure consists in the starvation of the masses, and in their possessing things they cannot use, and their children cannot use, but who bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth, casting darkness and despair and impressing it on everyone else.

“So, therefore,” said the Lord, in effect, “if you see these things that now have occurred and exist in this and other countries, there must be a constant scattering of wealth in any country if this country is to survive.”

“Then,” said the Lord, in effect, “every seventh year there shall be a remission of debts; there will be no debts after 7 years.” That was the law.

Now, let us take America today. We have in American today, ladies and gentlemen, $272,000,000,000 of debt. Two hundred and seventy-two thousand millions of dollars of debts are owed by the various people of this country today. Why, my friends, that cannot be paid. It is not possible for that kind of debt to be paid.

The entire currency of the United States is only $6,000,000,000. That is all of the money that we have got in America today. All the actual money you have got in all of your banks, all that you have got in the Government Treasury, is $6,000,000,000; and if you took all that money and paid it out today you would still owe $266,000,000,000; and if you took all that money and paid again you would still owe $260,000,000,000; and if you took it, my friends, 20 times and paid it you would still owe $150,000,000,000.

You would have to have 45 times the entire money supply of the United States today to pay the debts of the people of America, and then they would just have to start out from scratch, without a dime to go on with.

So, my friends, it is impossible to pay all of these debts, and you might as well find out that it cannot be done. The United States Supreme Court has definitely found out that it could not be done, because, in a Minnesota case, it held that when a State has postponed the evil day of collecting a debt it was a valid and constitutional exercise of legislative power.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I may proceed to give you some other words that I think you can understand — I am not going to belabor you by quoting tonight — I am going to tell you what the wise men of all ages and all times, down even to the present day, have all said: That you must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own. You cannot let any man own $300,000,000,000 or $400,000,000,000. If you do, one man can own all of the wealth that they United States has in it.

Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.

So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other, until there is not any kind of business that a small, independent man could go into today and make a living, and there is not any kind of business that an independent man can go into and make any money to buy an automobile with; and they have finally and gradually and steadily eliminated everybody from the fields in which there is a living to be made, and still they have got little enough sense to think they ought to be able to get more business out of it anyway.

If you reduce a man to the point where he is starving to death and bleeding and dying, how do you expect that man to get hold of any money to spend with you? It is not possible. Then, ladies and gentlemen, how do you expect people to live, when the wherewith cannot be had by the people?

In the beginning I quoted from the Scriptures. I hope you will understand that I am not quoting Scripture to convince you of my goodness personally, because that is a thing between me and my Maker, that is something as to how I stand with my Maker and as to how you stand with your Maker. That is not concerned with this issue, except and unless there are those of you who would be so good as to pray for the souls of some of us. But the Lord gave his law, and in the Book of James they said so, that the rich should weep and howl for the miseries that had come upon them; and, therefore, it was written that when the rich hold goods they could not use and could not consume, you will inflict punishment on them, and nothing but days of woe ahead of them.

Then we have heard of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialog between Plato and Socrates, in which one said that great riches brought on great poverty, and would be destructive of a country. Read what they said. Read what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man.

It is a very simple process of mathematics that you do not have to study, and that no one is going to discuss with you.

So that was the view of Socrates and Plato. That was the view of the English statesmen. That was the view of American statesmen. That was the view of American statesmen like Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt, and even as late as Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Both of these men, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt, came out and said there had to be a decentralization of wealth, but neither one of them did anything about it. But, nevertheless, they recognized the principle. The fact that neither one of them ever did anything about it is their own problem that I am not undertaking to criticize; but had Mr. Hoover carried out what he says ought to be done, he would be retiring from the President’s office, very probably, 3 years from now, instead of 1 year ago; and had Mr. Roosevelt proceeded along the lines that he stated were necessary for the decentralization of wealth, he would have gone, my friends, a long way already, and within a few months he would have probably reached a solution of all of the problems that afflict this country.

But I wish to warn you now that nothing that has been done up to this date has taken one dime away from these big-fortune holders; they own just as much as they did, and probably a little bit more; they hold just as many of the debts of the common people as they ever held, and probably a little bit more; and unless we, my friends, are going to give the people of this country a fair shake of the dice, by which they will all get something out of the funds of this land, there is not a chance on the topside of this God’s eternal earth by which we can rescue this country and rescue the people of this country.

It is necessary to save the Government of the country, but is much more necessary to save the people of America. We love this country. We love this Government. It is a religion, I say. It is a kind of religion people have read of when women, in the name of religion, would take their infant babes and throw them into the burning flame, where they would be instantly devoured by the all-consuming fire, in days gone by; and there probably are some people of the world even today, who, in the name of religion, throw their tear-dimmed eyes into the sad faces of their fathers and mothers, who cannot given them food and clothing they both needed, and which is necessary to sustain them, and that goes on day after day, and night after night, when day gets into darkness and blackness, knowing those children would arise in the morning without being fed, and probably to bed at night without being fed.

Yet in the name of our Government, and all alone, those people undertake and strive as hard as they can to keep a good government alive, and how long they can stand that no one knows. If I were in their place tonight, the place where millions are, I hope that I would have what I might say — I cannot give you the word to express the kind of fortitude they have; that is the word — I hope that I might have the fortitude to praise and honor my Government that had allowed me here in this land, where there is too much to eat and too much to wear, to starve in order that a handful of men can have so much more than they can ever eat or they can ever wear.

Now, we have organized a society, and we call it “Share Our Wealth Society,” a society with the motto “every man a king.”

Every man a king, so there would be no such thing as a man or woman who did not have the necessities of life, who would not be dependent upon the whims and caprices and ipsi dixit of the financial martyrs for a living. What do we propose by this society? We propose to limit the wealth of big men in the country. There is an average of $15,000 in wealth to every family in America. That is right here today.

We do not propose to divide it up equally. We do not propose a division of wealth, but we propose to limit poverty that we will allow to be inflicted upon any man’s family. We will not say we are going to try to guarantee any equality, or $15,000 to families. No; but we do say that one third of the average is low enough for any one family to hold, that there should be a guaranty of a family wealth of around $5,000; enough for a home, and automobile, a radio, and the ordinary conveniences, and the opportunity to educate their children; a fair share of the income of this land thereafter to that family so there will be no such thing as merely the select to have those things, and so there will be no such thing as a family living in poverty and distress.

We have to limit fortunes. Our present plan is that we will allow no one man to own more than $50,000,000. We think that with that limit we will be able to carry out the balance of the program. It may be necessary that we limit it to less than $50,000,000. It may be necessary, in working out of the plans, that no man’s fortune would be more than $10,000,000 or $15,000,000. But be that as it may, it will still be more than any one man, or any one man and his children and their children, will be able to spend in their lifetimes; and it is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.

Another thing we propose is old-age pension of $30 a month for everyone that is 60 years old. Now, we do not give this pension to a man making $1,000 a year, and we do not give it to him if he has $10,000 in property, but outside of that we do.

We will limit hours of work. There is not any necessity of having over-production. I think all you have got to do, ladies and gentlemen, is just limit the hours of work to such an extent as people will work only so long as is necessary to produce enough for all of the people to have what they need. Why, ladies and gentleman, let us say that all of these labor-saving devices reduce hours down to where you do not have to work but 4 hours a day; that is enough for these people, and then praise be the name of the Lord, if it gets that good. Let it be good and not a curse, and then we will have 5 hours a day and 5 days a week, or even less that that, and we might give a man a whole month off during a year, or give him 2 months; and we might do what other countries have seen fit to do, and what I did in Louisiana, by having schools by which adults could go back and learn the things that have been discovered since they went to school.

We will not have any trouble taking care of the agricultural situation. All you have to do is balance your production with your consumption. You simply have to abandon a particular crop that you have too much of, and all you have to do is store the surplus for the next year, and the Government will take it over. When you have good crops in the area in which the crops that have been planted are sufficient for another year, put in your public works in the particular year when you do not need to raise any more, and by that means you get everybody employed. When the Government has enough of any particular crop to take care of all of the people, that will be all that is necessary; and in order to do all of this, our taxation is going to be to take the billion-dollar fortunes and strip them down to frying size, not to exceed $50,000,000, and it is necessary to come to $10,000,000, we will come to $10,000,000. We have worked the proposition out to guarantee a limit upon property (and no man will own less than one third the average), and guarantee a reduction of fortunes and a reduction of hours to spread wealth throughout this country. We would care for the old people above 60 and take them away from this thriving industry and given them a chance to enjoy the necessities and live in ease, and thereby lift from the market the labor which would probably create a surplus of commodities.

Those are the things we propose to do. “Every man a king.” Every man to eat when there is something to eat; all to wear something when there is something to wear. That makes us all sovereign.

You cannot solve these things through these various and sundry alphabetical codes. You can have the N.R.A. and P.W.A. and C.W.A. and the U.U.G. and G.I.N. and any other kind of “dadgummed” lettered code. You can wait until doomsday and see 25 more alphabets, but that is not going to solve this proposition. Why hide? Why quibble? You know what the trouble is. The man that says he does not know what the trouble is just hiding his face to keep from seeing the sunlight.

God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120,000,000 people together, you know what the trouble is.

We had these great incomes in this country; but the farmer, who plowed from sunup to sundown, who labored here from sunup to sundown for 6 days a week, wound up at the end of the with practically nothing.

And we ought to take care of the veterans of the wars in this program. That is a small matter. Suppose it does cost a billion dollars a year — that means that the money will be scattered throughout this country. We ought to pay them a bonus. We can do it. We ought to take care of every single one of the sick and disabled veterans. I do not care whether a man got sick on the battlefield or did not; every man that wore the uniform of this country is entitled to be taken care of, and there is money enough to do it; and we need to spread the wealth of the country, which you did not do in what you call the N.R.A.

If the N.R.A. has done any good, I can put it all in my eye without having it hurt. All I can see that N.R.A. has done is to put the little man out of business — the little merchant in his store, the little Dago that is running a fruit stand, or the Greek shoe-shining stand, who has to take hold of a code of 275 pages and study with a spirit level and compass and looking-glass; he has to hire a Philadelphia lawyer to tell him what is in the code; and by the time he learns what the code is, he is in jail or out of business; and they have got a chain code system that has already put him out of business. The N.R.A. is not worth anything, and I said so when they put it through.

Now, my friends, we have got to hit the root with the axe. Centralized power in the hands of a few, with centralized credit in the hands of a few, is the trouble.

Get together in your community tonight or tomorrow and organize one of our Share Our Wealth societies. If you do not understand it, write me and let me send you the platform; let me give you the proof of it.

This is Huey P. Long talking, United States Senator, Washington, D.C. Write me and let me send you the data on this proposition. Enroll with us. Let us make known to the people what we are going to do. I will send you a button, if I have got enough of them left. We have got a little button that some of our friends designed, with our message around the rim of the button, and in the center “Every man a king.” Many thousands of them are meeting through the United States, and every day we are getting hundreds and hundreds of letters. Share Our Wealth societies are now being organized, and people have it within their power to relieve themselves from this terrible situation.

Look at what the Mayo brothers announced this week, these greatest scientists of all the world today, who are entitled to have more money than all the Morgans and the Rockefellers, or anyone else, and yet the Mayos turn back their big fortunes to be used for treating the sick, and said they did not want to lay up fortunes in this earth, but wanted to turn them back where they would do some good; but the other big capitalists are not willing to do that, are not willing to do what these men, 10 times more worthy, have already done, and it is going to take a law to require them to do it.

Organize your Share Our Wealth Society and get your people to meet with you, and make known your wishes to your Senators and Representatives in Congress.

Now, my friends, I am going to stop. I thank you for this opportunity to talk to you. I am having to talk under the auspices and by the grace and permission of the National Broadcasting System tonight, and they are letting me talk free. If I had the money, and I wish I had the money, I would like to talk to you more often on this line, but I have not got it, and I cannot expect these people to give it to me free except on some rare instance. But, my friends, I hope to have the opportunity to talk with you, and I am writing to you, and I hope that you will get up and help in the work, because the resolution and bills are before Congress, and we hope to have your help in getting together and organizing your Share Our Wealth society.

Now, that I have but a minute left, I want to say that I suppose my family is listening in on the radio in New Orleans, and I will say to my wife and three children that I am entirely well and hope to be home before many more days, and I hope they have listened to my speech tonight, and I wish them and all their neighbors and friends everything good that may be had.

I thank you, my friends, for your kind attention, and I hope you will enroll with us, take care of your own work in the work of this Government, and share or help in our Share Our Wealth society.

I thank you.

[commencement speech] Suzan-Lori Parks @Mount Holyoke

SUZAN-LORI PARKS COMMENCEMENT SPEECH TO THE MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE CLASS OF 2001 HELD ON MAY 27, 2001

THANK YOU, Graduating Class of 2001, Fellow Honorary Degree Recipients, Distinguished Administration and Faculty, Alumnae, Parents, Family and Friends, thank you all so much for inviting me to speak with you today. I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1985. Here I am 16 years later. The learned faculty is seated there behind me, and so, before I get into the swing of things, I want to state that any grammatical errors, historical fabrications and inappropriate flights of fancy contained within the following speech are the sole responsibility of the Commencement Speaker and, if found objectionable, should in no way be viewed as an example of the caliber of education one would receive at Mount Holyoke College.

It is commencement and you all are commencing—you are beginning. Today is yr birthday. Its a sort of birthday for me too: this is my first honorary degree. Yr sitting there looking forward into me and Im standing here looking forward into you. I’ll be yr mirror for a few minutes, if you’ll be mine. All of us together, we are commencing. It is the beginning of things, its also the end of things and Ive brought along 16 SUGGESTIONS which may be of use—as you walk through the rest of yr lives.

Suggestions and Advice are funny things. In 1982 I took a creative writing class with James Baldwin. He suggested to me that I try playwrighting and I tried playwrighting and here I am today. That was some good advice. But it wasnt the best advice I ever got.

The BEST advice I ever got was also the WORST advice any one ever gave me. In high school I had a very stern English teacher and one gloomy day she summoned me into her gloomy office. She knew I loved English and that I wanted to study literature and perhaps someday become a writer—”Dont study English,” she said, “you havent got the talent for it.” What a horrible thing to say. What an excellent suggestion. It was an excellent suggestion because it forced me to think for myself. And thats my first suggestion for you.

SUGGESTION #1: CULTIVATE THE ABILITY TO THINK FOR YRSELF. When someone gives you advice, you lay their advice along side yr own thoughts and feelings, and if what they suggest jives with what youve got going on inside, then you follow their suggestion. ON THE OTHER HAND—there are lots of people out there who will suggest all kinds of stupid stuff for you to incorporate into your life. There are lots of people who will encourage you to stray from your hearts desire. Go ahead and let them speak their piece, and you may even want to give them a little smile depending on your mood, but if what they suggest does not jive with the thoughts and feelings that are already alive and growing beautifully inside you, then dont follow their suggestion. THINK for yrself, LISTEN to yr heart, TUNE IN to yr gut. These are just the things for which Mount Holyoke has educated you. Youve all received an excellent education here and education, excellent education, is just a kind of ear training. That’s all it really is—Inner Ear Training.

SUGGESTION #2: EMBRACE DISCIPLINE. Give yrself the opportunity to discover that discipline is just an extension of the love you have for yrself—discipline is not, as a lot of people think, some horrid exacting torturous self flagellating activity—Discipline is just an expression of Love—like the Disciples—they didnt follow Christ because they HAD TO.

SUGGESTION #3: PRACTICE PATIENCE. Whether you sit around like I do, working for that perfect word, or yr working toward a dream job, or wishing for a dreamy sweetheart. Things will come to you when yr ready to handle them—not before. Just keep walking yr road.

SUGGESTION #4; And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road. Something like—the yellow brick road in the WIZARD OF OZ. You see the glory of OZ up ahead—but there are lots of twists and turns along the way—lots of tin men, lots of green women.

SUGGESTION #5: DEVELOP THE ART OF MAKING A SILK PURSE FROM A SOW’S EAR.

Cause, you know, it aint whatcha got, its how you work it.

SUGGESTION #6: For every 30 min of tv you watch, READ one poem outloud. For every work of literature you read, spend at least 30min in the mall, or in a mall equivalent such as Wal-Mart. This is cross-fertilization—a now-age form of crop rotation—a way to cross train yr spirit and keep interested in everything and not get too stuck in yr ways.

Speaking of yr ways and yr way:

SUGGESTION #7: GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. You can spend yr life tripping on yrself, you can also spend yr life tripping yrself up. Get out of yr own way.

Yr young, brilliant, and today is yr birthday. Yve got yr whole lives ahead of you and each of you will spend yr life doing some thing, or maybe a host of things. Dont just spend your life.

SPLURGE

SUGGESTION #8: SPLURGE YR LIFE BY DOING SOMETHING YOU LOVE. My husband Paul is a musician. He says that the concept of talent is overrated because “talent” is really the gift of love. “Talent” happens when yr in love with something and you devote yr life to it and its yr love of it that makes you want to keep doing it, its yr love of it which helps you overcome the obstacles along the way, and its yr love of it that begets a talent for it.

SUGGESTIONS #9, 10, 11, 12, & 13: Eat Yr Vegetables, Floss Yr Teeth, Try Meditation, Get Some Exercise, & SHARPEN YR 7 SENSES: the basic 5 Senses + the 6th Sense: ESP & the 7th Sense which is yr sense of HUMOR.

16 years ago I sat where one of you is sitting now. The class of 1985 was graduating. And we were lucky as we had a great poet speaking to us. She was a great writer and an MHC alum. She was pretty and poised and she had such grace—so much grace that I sat there looking at her thinking that she looked more as if she had gone to Smith. Anyway it was sunny and we were all in black probably sweating a little and she spoke brilliantly and eloquently and to this day I have absolutely no memory of what she said. I dont remember one word of her brilliant commencement address the address that launched the class of 1985. Not one word. I want you to catch my drift. Im not saying our speaker was boring. Im saying that I dont remember what she said. But I do remember some words that went through my head at the very moment our speakers words were passing by. It was a voice, coming from my gut, a voice coming from my heart and the voice said: “Ah, Suzan-Lori Parks, the next degree youre going to receive is an honorary degree from MHC.”

Yep I really said that to myself. And here I am today.

SUGGESTION #14: SAY “THANK YOU” at least once a week.

SUGGESTION #15: LOVE YRSELF. Why not.

16 years from now who will remember these words? Maybe no one. But maybe someone will. Maybe, from back in 1985, there is a classmate of mine who, to this day, remembers every word of our commencement address and this classmate repeats those words and they lighthouse her stormy days, maybe. Or if not a classmate remembering then maybe an alum if not an alum maybe a family member, maybe a parent, up there, gathered in the background having given so much, helping you get to this special day. Whether my words today will be remembered is not the issue because, you see, what Im saying to you right now isnt as important as what you are saying, right now, to yrselves.

SUGGESTION #16: BE BOLD. ENVISION YRSELF LIVING A LIFE THAT YOU LOVE. Believe, even if you can only muster yr faith for just this moment, believe that the sort of life you wish to live is, at this very moment, just waiting for you to summon it up. And when you wish for it, you begin moving toward it, and it, in turn, begins moving toward you.

As the great writer James Baldwin said: “Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head.”

THANK YOU

[commencement speech] Oliver Stone @UC Berkeley

This speech by Oliver Stone is four pages, outlined below:

1. Searching for the Spiritual
2. Movies and American Society
3. The Dream-State of Recent History
4. The Struggle for Consciousness

Searching for the Spiritual

I had the fortunate privilege recently to be able to shoot one of my movies in Thailand. It was called Heaven and Earth, and it’s coming out this year. I spent several months over there preparing the movie, and I was struck, as was my crew, by the spirituality of Thailand. By the concept of Buddhism immanent in every walk of life.

Of course Thailand has a very corrupt part of society, much like our own land. The politicians for years have been known to be on the take; there’s a large amount of deforestation going on; bribes get you everything you need in that society. And the military pretty much dominates it. It’s a military-dominated society. When we were there a military coup d’état occurred and democracy was shuttled to the side. It was an interesting time, because the people are very quiet, and in a sense, very passive by our standards. Until they killed some young people, some protesters, there wasn’t the outbreak of sensational newspaper reaction that you get in our country; but something deeper was going on.

Thailand, as I said, is a Buddhist society; at 6:00 in the mornings everywhere you go you see monks walking on the sides of the roads with their beggar baskets. People give them food. It’s very beautiful, the sharing and the trust given the monks.

At one point in my stay there, approximately 100,000 monks got together — in a country that’s about as big as Texas — to chant and sing and pray in protest against the military regime.

It was something that was not reported in the newspaper; you didn’t hear about it probably because our secular press doesn’t pick up  on things like that, but it had a tremendous, tremendous impact in that country. It wasn’t too much longer after that day when the force of their prayers worked and the military government collapsed. They gave up, and they returned to a form of democratic government. It was a very noble example of bringing change through prayer.

When I got back to America, I was wondering where that element exists in our society. We are a very secular, information- and result-oriented society. There’s very little faith in the right side of the brain type of thinking, or mysticism, or what we call spirituality. Buddhism in this country is not really understood; it’s regarded as sort of quaint, it seems to be an old-fashioned religion. But it isn’t, really. It’s a very active one and has a place in the modern world.

I couldn’t find that kind of spirituality in this country, except, oddly enough, in the American Indian cultures where I’ve been able to travel with some friends over the last few years. With the Sioux up north in South Dakota, and the Navajo and Hopi tribes down in the Southwest. It’s been a very eye-opening experience for me to attend a sun dance, for example.

A sun dance, some of you may know, is a coming together of the tribes in a vast gathering in the summertime to pray, to exorcise the demons, to bring the tribe together, to make speeches. Certainly the physical highlight of the event is the piercing of flesh, where the males of the tribe walk around a tree in circles and dance around the tree for days on end. When I was there, there were 300 sun-dancers. There were old people, young people; they beat the drums through the day. There must have been a hundred with pierced flesh on the front, here on the breast, and on the back. They were crying as they went through a wall of pain, young boys up to age ll. I saw men lifted into the trees by their chests. Horses were pulling the ropes, they were dragging buffalo skulls in the dust like Christ figures. There was a man walking backward the whole time, for three or four days, until he was totally dizzy, I’m sure. But he was looking for the vision.

Visions — often of ancestors. Without food and water in a hot summer, you start to see a lot of ancestors. And I felt that I was witnessing a combination of fear and an act of faith at the same time, which is rare.

The sun dance was their opera and their theater event of the year. In our culture, you go to the theater, the curtain comes down, you applaud, you pay fifty bucks and that’s it. But there is faith in fear. And I think the whole event, the four days, the building of that fear was intended to induce a sacred state of belief in what St. Paul called “the evidence of things unseen.” To the Indians, the thing unseen is the Great Creator of Being, Tonkasha or Tongashira. He’s sacred in all things of the earth. The rocks that are our ancestors, Mother Earth, the sky, the sacred pipe that they smoke, the Indians view all things as spiritual. All our winters, the 70 or 80 winters that we pass here on earth, are as a speck in time compared to the eternity spent in the spirit world. We here in this room really are ghosts, secondary to that spark.

For them, the Holy Spirit very much exists, but it exists in ritual. A byproduct is art, and art exists for them only if it is holy, blessed with the spirit. Because art, cultural or whatever, is meant to heal, to bind the tribe together on an annual basis to revive mourning and tears and pity and horror and joy. Those things the Greeks called catharsis, the sharing of pity and terror and joy with all. A bond exists between the onlookers and the pierced ones. They give their flesh as offerings as Jesus did. We watch and we are moved by the sun dance’s sacrifice, and after four days, we once again commit ourselves to things of the spirit.

Movies and American Society

This is what I think; I might be presumptuous, but this is what I think movies are for in our culture, or at least what movies should aspire to. A coming together of our tribe. Drama as catharsis, as release, as reaffirmation of the power of the spirit. Films, I feel, should be like the great Hindu and Buddhist ideographs I saw on the temple walls of Southeast Asia. Massive paintings and murals telling the common tales, well-known tales of danger, fear, death, heroes, elephants, love, the birth of children and new kings, new dreams. They worship dreams. Holiness in art, ritual, entertainment.

I tried in my own way, with Born on the Fourth of July and JFK, to tap into the national American conscience of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. I tried to show that and I hoped to bring together the nation by depicting a national event and showing how it divided this country, and how it could also heal. But I feel the wounds are still too fresh. The film was attacked in many intellectual quarters from both the left and the right, for being false or simple-minded.

I sometimes think that America, unlike the Sioux or the Buddhist societies I’ve seen, is torn by too many opinion-makers that divide us into a quarrelsome Athenian society where individual artistic achievements are suspect as attempts to enrich ourselves, or as political propaganda statements. If art exists as spiritual revival for the country or the tribe, then it must include controversy, because art must challenge the thinking and fashion of the time and of society. Art must peel back the lie. Often the official lies, as you know, are confused in our history books with the truth.

In our culture I often find the artistic is denied, the concept of catharsis is secularized. All meaning is over analyzed. The truth of the time of a working-class boy, Born on the Fourth of July, losing his legs in Vietnam and being angry  about it, or a young president, Kennedy, being assassinated for a viable motive is just too sentimental or too controversial for our opinion-makers, our cutting-edge magazines, our secular newspapers. Very rarely, in my experience, can a movie break through this secularization of thought, this barrier of repression in our culture. The news must be made by journalists. History must be interpreted by opinion-makers and scholars. Drama is, in our country, a political weapon. Hitler taught us how, with his mass theatrical lies. This century, with Stalin and Hitler and Madison Avenue and Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the political image-makers and their line of puppet presidents with smiling faces have taught us that the bigger the lie, the more likely that people are to believe it. We have, I believe, confused art, the spiritual basis of art, with media. Media as hysteria, media as propaganda, the skin of events only. We have taken the Hindu wall paintings and stripped them of religious and spiritual meaning, for our propaganda purposes.

This is frightening if you consider all the implications, because it puts us in a realm of 21st-century human beings who will not really be in touch with themselves. We’ll be cybermen and -women, artificial intelligence moving on fast-forward. It will probably be exciting but we may not be in touch with who we really are in our essence, our primal essence. I sometimes wake up and wonder how to make it through another day of belief. I feel as many of you might, stripped of spiritual meaning, of a place in the world. Sometimes we hear the earth is shot and the species is going to mutate into weird beings with plastic lungs, dying for food. The waters are dying. Progress itself is now suspect. Why do we breathe, why do we procreate? My generation, I think, is facing the most depressing moment in time. The question is why survive, why? Except finally because it is all we know.

The Dream-State of Recent History

As a filmmaker I have always responded as a dreamer, not as a doer. I don’t build houses, I don’t make the waters run, pump electricity, explore the universe, doctor people … all I do is dream. I make some semblance of those Hindu wall paintings that I hope people like because it reflects a dream of theirs. I try to go to the secret heart we all have, the collective unconscious. But the price I pay is that life increasingly seems to me but a dream, a psychological delusion and metaphor, all symbol, that I have witnessed in my lifetime. My critics like to call me “Oliver Stoned,” but I feel we all are “Oliver Stoned” because we have to be in order to fully understand the madness of modern times. Don’t we all, whether we know it or not, live in the mass delusion of a dream state of recent history? In my short lifetime, I’ve seen at least seven instances of it on a massive scale.

1. My mother was French. I grew up in France in the ’50s and when I was there everyone I spoke to, children my own age, adults, no one ever said one word about the French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. As you may know now, it was very, very extensive. But everyone I talked to in those years was a member of the French Resistance or in some way had staked out his heroism. It wasn’t talked about, that was the point, it wasn’t talked about. It took one filmmaker, well more than one but one filmmaker in particular who did stand up, Marcel Ophuls, and his film “The Sorrow and the Pity,” to start to open up this aspect of French society that was a wound of denial.
2. I had the opportunity to go to Russia in the early 1980s to write a screenplay about dissidents in Russia under the old regime of Brezhnev, and all the people I talked to, old and young alike, were guilty of amnesia. No one accepted the crimes of Stalin. They treated Stalin like he was a benign grandfather, someone on the order of Winston Churchill. We all know that Stalin committed some of the largest numerical atrocities of this century, millions of people were killed. But they denied this — there was either an embarrassed silence about their leader or incredible praise. There again, I ran into society in denial.
3. In my own life, as you know, I went to Vietnam. I served over there in the military, once, and as a civilian another time, and I came back to America in 1969 and there was a blanket of silence over Vietnam. It was just not discussed. It was a very strange thing.  It was impolite. All the official histories I read of Vietnam were, in my opinion (everyone has a different Vietnam), all absolutely fraudulent. So that’s why I wrote Platoon, because I felt if I could do one thing in my life it would be at least to deal honestly with some truth I had experienced in my lifetime and to tell it like it is, as opposed to going along with this silence. Vietnam is still a wound, as you know. Bush and Reagan have told us repeatedly that the war is over, but Vietnam is a state of mind. It’s like the French collaboration, or Stalin in Russia — Vietnam is a sick state of mind that is evident in this country still to this day. I was just at a seminar down in Hampton-Sydney and the undergraduates hadn’t done a lot of reading, they didn’t know anything about Vietnam. They didn’t know what the Gulf of Tonkin was — which was, of course, one of the most interesting staged events of our lifetime. It led to the declaration of hostility against North Vietnam and was a staged and manipulated event. People forgot that we carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia. Possibly a million to two million Vietnamese died — who knows, they don’t keep statistical MIA’s over there — but it was a holocaust for that society, and we were very much a part of it.
4. In the mid-’80s I was able to go down to Central America. That was another shock. I was in Honduras and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. I did a film called Salvador. There was a very strong bias towards invading Nicaragua at that time, up until 1986. When I saw the American soldiers in the streets of Honduras and El Salvador, I asked them if any of them remembered Vietnam. These were younger people but there in green uniforms, just like I was in Vietnam a few years before. And they really didn’t. They were embarrassed to draw any parallels to our behavior in Central America. I honestly don’t feel they knew anything about Vietnam. It was devastating, it was devastating to the shared experience of the country to find its citizens maintained an indifference to its own history.
5. Another example in my lifetime is certainly the John Kennedy killing. I won’t belabor it; I made a film about it, some of you people have seen it, but the official historians won’t tell you the truth. The polls have always shown a deeply inherent popular distrust of the government version of it, the Warren Commission. The people who control the memory of America, the newspaper, press people, the politicians, they would have you believe that Kennedy was killed simply by a lone nut in a random shooting and will not explore the pattern of events that has dictated our lives from the ’60s on. They tell you that Lyndon Johnson didn’t change a thing when he became president, that he didn’t change the policies of Kennedy. This is a very tricky question, but it is not accurate: there was a significant change of policies under Lyndon Johnson, starting with the day he came into office, his meeting on Vietnam with his chief advisors. They issued, two days after Kennedy was murdered, a new national security action memorandum called 273, which was much more aggressive in posture and tone than national security action 263 which was in effect until that moment. Kennedy had made very strong indications and plans, on paper, not just by saying it, but on paper, that he was going to withdraw by 1965, and it’s all in that paper which many intelligent people, in their contempt for Kennedy, continue to deny as some sort of public relations stunt.
6. I think another bogeyman in my life, another dream, is the CIA. To some people they’re benign, they don’t exist. But I don’t think the American people are aware of the strong links this country has to Germany, to the Nazis in World War II, and how much the CIA relied on the Nazi intelligence apparatus to get information against the Russians. I would argue that the Cold War really began in 1944, when we sort of knew that Germany was going to lose, when we started to collect all the smart people that we could in Eastern Europe, and in Germany and even in Russia, to start to fight the Soviet Union. The CIA is very much a part of that. In fact, I would argue that the Nazi scientists came here, the Nazi intelligence people, and they brought with them a Nazi frame of mind which inculcated itself into the American social fabric. What the CIA did through the 1950s and ’60s was destabilize foreign governments, use psychological warfare on a scale that dwarfed all Nazi efforts, and basically militarized our country into a state of fighting a Cold War. We were spending enormous sums of money that should have been going into a healthier society, being used only for weapons of destruction. The CIA is still there, it has not gone away. It is probably the largest criminal organization in the world, and has been in the past.
7. Another dream (or nightmare) is that the media industry can control the events of our time through the media, and through that media it becomes the truth. Every night on television you look at Dan Rather and he tries to sell you his interpretation of events, and it’s basically the consensus journalism that runs through channels ABC, NBC and CBS. The same story is repeated, the same take on the same story, the same spin. Vary rarely do they go into a deeper look, below the surface. This Afghanistan war business is frightening, the way they kept repeating the same mantra “the Russians did it, the Russians did it.” Anyone who studies Afghanistan, and I hope they will, will find that there was a lot of provocation going on in Afghanistan, through Iran; that we provoked the Russians, in many ways, to come into Afghanistan because we wanted to drain them.

The Struggle for Consciousness

I sometimes think that the media have dreamed our history up. They dreamed Watergate, the revelations of Watergate, of which we saw the surface. There so much missing tape, there’s 400 hours of tape, that we, the naive ones, saw just a few hours of — the surface events. There may have been a reason for Watergate, which I’m not going to discuss here, but I urge you to read a book such as Silent Coup. I urge you as students to look through Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. It goes through American history upside down. It reexamines Columbus, the genocide against the Indians. It reexamines all the stories I grew up with; the Indian wars, the origins of the American Revolution, what George Washington was really doing. The origins of the Civil War. Was slavery really the issue it was supposed to be? Was it really such a noble conflict? How did World War I get started?  There are some fascinating economic reasons behind World War I. What about that most sacred cow of all, the origins of World War II? I’m not saying that Hitler was a nice guy by any means, but I am saying that the origins of that war were thicker and more dense than is the simplistic version of the “good war” against Germany. The Korean War is a puzzle to most of us. Vietnam eludes many people. I honestly have reached a point, cynical as it may sound, where I do believe that history is written by those who win. They won. They killed Kennedy, they rewrote it to match what they wanted you to believe, and if Hitler had won World War II, believe me, today we’d be reading a different history about the United States to justify Hitler. Winner takes all. Never underestimate the power of corruption to change history.

I guess I sound pessimistic, but in my heart, being a filmmaker and taking dramatic license, I am most optimistic. I do feel the media can be used for good purpose in the 21st century. I do feel that a golden age could be upon us. A higher consciousness, so to speak, through computers and communication. In a sort of Buckminster Fuller paradigm, people would be smarter because they have to be, in order to make the earth system work. Fuller would say no matter how greedy and selfish people could get, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, leaders, at some point it becomes naturally unproductive to be so selfish. They’ve got to start to clean up the atmosphere because it becomes economically profitable to do so. Profit motivates. Survival is profitable. Technology and soul.

We must, in our daily lives, struggle to keep our consciousness growing. I sometimes feel like my children, young people, are only getting film sequels, robots, sound-bites, created by cynical people. I feel that the minds of my children will perish in a sleepwalk through their adult years from the suburbs to the car to the golf course to the office. Devoid of a sensibility to look beyond their own lives to reach out to others. To trip over a homeless person in the street without noticing because they will be unable to deal with the reality of suffering. Nothing wrong with suffering, suffering is good. The Indians say “walk with the pain of the world.” It is good to be exposed to suffering, not to run from it, not to keep it at arm’s length through some expensive government program that we can ignore. It is good to make it part of your everyday life, like the Indians do in Calcutta.

I think with movies we can begin to strengthen people’s immune systems, because people go into the movies with their defenses down. It’s not real, therefore not threatening. When they least expect it, that might be the best time for the guerrillas of art to get in there and move the head  and the heart. One hopes that people will leave the theater renewed, sacred. In a system that has rendered man more and more insignificant, where artists and all people are packaged and trivialized by the media, where their dreams are categorized and destroyed, I really want to believe in the greatness of the spirit of man. And I think so do our movies, that’s why we all like happy endings. I think it’s something fundamental to all people.

I choose to believe, in the back-burner of my mind, in some old movie hero besieged on all sides by enemy swordsmen, who by some inner force and greater love conquers his adversaries against all odds. What is a movie but this parade of faces across the screen? Greta Garbo to Julia Roberts, they’re faces that, for the most part, you love. Most of the power of movies is the close-up of the face. People, I think, want to see faces because that face of sorrow, suffering, pain, resurrection makes the audience, once again, believe in being human. In traversing the odds, in getting up in the morning and making it through the day.

I think man wants to believe in man, woman wants to believe in women, people in people. And in a world where the systems are crushing us, where many of our leaders are shadow-puppets, mouthing hypocrisies on the media stage, where centralization, big business, big government, is constantly, fascistically, gaining each day on the individual and has wiped out so much of the human spirit in this century, I think that people are the one recurrent hope we have. Day by day in the Calcuttas and Manhattans of the world, you get up and you get through the day, inch by inch, and by making it, you win. If adversity is big, and it is, then I choose to believe that man is bigger than his adversity. In the words of Andre Malraux, “The 21st century will either be spiritual or it will not be.”

Thank you.

[commencement speech] Ellen DeGeneres @Tulane University

Ellen DeGeneres gives a commencement speech at Tulane University on May 16, 2009.

Quote

Thank you, President Cowan, Mrs. President Cowen; distinguished guests, undistinguished guests – you know who you are, honored faculty and creepy Spanish teacher. And thank… More »

Thank you, President Cowan, Mrs. President Cowen; distinguished guests, undistinguished guests – you know who you are, honored faculty and creepy Spanish teacher. And thank you to all the graduating class of 2009, I realize most of you are hungover and have splitting headaches and haven’t slept since Fat Tuesday, but you can’t graduate ’til I finish, so listen up.

When I was asked to make the commencement speech, I immediately said yes. Then I went to look up what commencement meant. Which would have been easy if I had a dictionary, but most of the books in our house are Portia’s, and they’re all written in Australian. So I had to break the word down myself, to find out the meaning.

Commencement: common, and cement. Common cement. You commonly see cement on sidewalks. Sidewalks have cracks, and if you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. So there’s that. But I’m honored that you’ve asked me here to speak at your common cement.

I thought that you had to be a famous alumnus – alumini – aluminum – alumis – you had to graduate from this school. And I didn’t go to college here, and I don’t know if President Cowan knows, I didn’t go to any college at all. Any college. And I’m not saying you wasted your time, or money, but look at me, I”m a huge celebrity.

Although I did graduate from the school of hard knocks, our mascot was the knockers. I spent a lot of time here growing up. My mom worked at (?) and I would go there every time I needed to steal something out of her purse. But why am I here today? Clearly not to steal, you’re too far away and I’d never get away with it.

I’m here because of you. Because I can’t think of a more tenacious, more courageous graduating class. I mean, look at you all, wearing your robes. Usually when you’re wearing a robe at 10 in the morning, it means you’ve given up. I’m here because I love New Orleans. I was born and raised here, I spent my formative years here, and like you, while I was living here I only did laundry six times. When I finished school, I was completely lost. And by school, I mean middle school, but I went ahead and finished high school anyway. And I – I really, I had no ambition, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did everything from – I shucked oysters, I was a hostess, I was a bartender, I was a waitress, I painted houses, I sold vaccuum cleaners, I had no idea. And I thought I’d just finally settle in some job, and I would make enough money to pay my rent, maybe have basic cable, maybe not, I didn’t really have a plan, my point is that, by the time I was your age, I really thought I knew who I was, but I had no idea. Like for example, when I was your age, I was dating men. So what I’m saying is, when you’re older, most of you will be gay. Anyone writing this stuff down? Parents?

Anyway, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and the way I ended up on this path was from a very tragic event. I was maybe 19, and my girlfriend at the time was killed in a car accident. And I passed the accident, and I didn’t know it was her and I kept going, and I found out shortly after that, it was her. And I was living in a basement apartment, I had no money, I had no heat, no air, I had a mattress on the floor and the apartment was infested with fleas. And I was soul-searching, I was like, why is she suddenly gone, and there are fleas here? I don’t understand, there must be a purpose, and wouldn’t it be so convenient if we could pick up the phone and call God, and ask these questions.

And I started writing and what poured out of me was an imaginary conversation with God, which was one-sided, and I finished writing it and I looked at it and I said to myself, and I hadn’t even been doing stand-up, ever, there was no club in town. I said, “I’m gonna do this on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson”- at the time he was the king – “and I’m gonna be the first woman in the history of the show to be called over to sit down.” And several years later, I was the first woman in the history of the show, and only woman in the history of the show to sit down, because of that phone conversation with God that I wrote. And I started this path of stand-up and it was successful and it was great, but it was hard, because I was trying to please everybody and I had this secret that I was keeping, that I was gay. And I thought if people found out they wouldn’t like me, they wouldn’t laugh at me.

Then my career turned into – I got my own sitcom, and that was very successful, another level of success. And I thought, what if they find out I’m gay, then they’ll never watch, and this was a long time ago, this was when we just had white presidents – this was back, many years ago – and I finally decided that I was living with so much shame, and so much fear, that I just couldn’t live that way anymore, and I decided to come out and make it creative. And my character would come out at the same time, and it wasn’t to make a political statement, it wasn’t to do anything other than to free myself up from this heaviness that I was carrying around, and I just wanted to be honest. And I thought, “What’s the worst that could happen? I can lose my career”. I did. I lost my career. The show was cancelled after six years, without even telling me, I read it in the paper. The phone didn’t ring for three years. I had no offers. Nobody wanted to touch me at all. Yet, I was getting letters from kids that almost committed suicide, but didn’t, because of what I did. And I realised that I had a purpose. And it wasn’t just about me and it wasn’t about celebrity, but I felt like I was being punished… it was a bad time, I was angry, I was sad, and then I was offered a talkshow. And the people that offered me the talkshow tried to sell it. And most stations didn’t want to pick it up. Most people didn’t want to buy it because they thought nobody would watch me.

Really when I look back on it, I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean, it was so important for me to lose everything because I found out what the most important thing is, is to be true to yourself. Ultimately, that’s what’s gotten me to this place. I don’t live in fear, I’m free, I have no secrets. and I know I’ll always be ok, because no matter what, I know who I am. So In conclusion, when I was younger I thought success was something different. I thought when I grow up, I want to be famous. I want to be a star. I want to be in movies. When I grow up I want to see the world, drive nice cars, I want to have groupies. To quote the Pussycat Dolls. How many people thought it was “boobies”, by the way? It’s not, it’s “groupies”.

But my idea of success is different today. And as you grow, you’ll realise the definition of success changes. For many of you, today, success is being able to hold down 20 shots of tequila. For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. to try to be something that you’re not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. to contribute in some way. So to conclude my conclusion: follow your passion, stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path, and by all means you should follow that. Don’t give advice, it will come back and bite you in the ass. Don’t take anyone’s advice. So my advice to you is to be true to yourself and everything will be fine.

And I know that a lot of you are concerned about your future, but there’s no need to worry. The economy is booming, the job market is wide open, the planet is just fine. It’s gonna be great. You’ve already survived a hurricane. What else can happen to you? And as I mentioned before, some of the most devastating things that happen to you will teach you the most. And now you know the right questions to ask in your first job interview. Like, “Is it above sea level?” . So to conclude my conclusion that I’ve previously concluded, in the common cement speech, I guess what I’m trying to say is life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they see, you’ll have more beads than you know what to do with. And you’ll be drunk, most of the time. So the Katrina class of 2009, I say congratulations and if you don’t remember a thing I said today, remember this: you’re gonna be ok, dum de dum dum dum, just dance.