Another blast from the past, strangely relevant today.
Another blast from the past, strangely relevant today.
In June, 1980, several of our countrymen were being held by revolutionaries in a foreign land. It seemed very likely that our next president would be a former actor from B-movies, and we’d come out of several years of inflation caused by an unhealthy addiction to foreign oil. We’d seen the depths to which our leaders at the highest level were willing to stoop to get and keep power, and we believed ourselves to have been in a nearly constant danger of global holocaust at the hands of our leaders and those of the USSR.
In this environment, I graduated from high school. My class president, a young man named Tom Steubor, was charged with the duty of delivering an address to his peers at the occasion of our graduation. He was required to submit a speech to the school officials prior to the event for approval. This is not the speech he gave to the authorities, but is rather the speech he delivered, to a stunned audience, in the Henry Ford Auditorium in downtown Detroit.
Parents and relatives, school board and faculty, and of course, my fellow weeds. Today is a day which marks the beginning of our perilous voyage into the stormy sea of life. It is a journey which we have all long contemplated, yet never really prepared for. No longer shall we be sheltered, but rather, we go forth into the unknown, where the merciless unrelenting waves of fate seek constantly to inundate us as we struggle valiantly to stay afloat. Most of us will quickly learn to swim, while a few will struggle bravely only to be overcome by the uncaring waves, and eventually sink. While fewer still, a very select few, will not only stay afloat, but will find a way to escape from this ocean of mediocrity and fly away, high, into the sky of greatness. These are by no means merely the raving delusions of a salty old sea captain, but rather the effervescent overflow of my bubbling youthfulness.
We all know that once we leave high school, our lives will change. We are now suddenly adults, and must try to make adult decisions. For those of us who go on to college, and I think that’s the majority, this transition is somewhat minimized, for we go to a place where we are somewhat freer, yet still bound by rules and regulations and our lives are still structured by someone else. Thus, the old cliché’s about our lives suddenly changing once we leave high school, really do not apply anymore. They’ve gone the way of the dinosaur, fading into oblivion.
But once we go to college, what will we do? I think that most everyone has some sort of field of study already chosen and we’ll produce our fair share of doctors, engineers and business administrators. I also doubt that we’ll produce many janitors or truck drivers because the social strata of American society is no longer as mobile as they once were, and as the years go by, grows ever more rigid. The rich beget rich, and the poor beget poor.
As the products of a suburban culture we will undoubtedly live lives very similar to that of our parents, complete with car payments, mortgages, and ulcers. We can seek nothing better than suburbia, that bleak and plastic wasteland trapped between the urban and the rural and wanted by neither. But is this what we really want? For most of us, the answer to that is yes because we are too saturated with social conformity to dare say anything else. Yet who can deny the need for change. The past generations have left us a heritage of blood and death, poisoned our planet, and poisoned our minds. Look at the world today, and ask yourself if you want to live in it, let alone raise your children in it.
So it’s up to us to change it, to set the world back on the right track. I’m not trying to blame anyone for the lousy situation we’re in, especially not our parents or grandparents who are here to wish us luck. I merely wish to point out that the world is going downhill, and it’s a snowballing effect. It gets worse and worse as time goes by, until it reaches a point where it grows out of control, and we no longer have any determination over our own destiny.
We have to stop it. That is the role of our generation. We have to be the ones to say no, the ones to make the sacrifice in order to ensure the well being of future generations. That’s a key word, sacrifice. It won’t be easy and no one will thank us for it. But we have little choice. Sacrifice and an abolition of all the old outdated social mores created by men who now rot in the ground.
That’s a hefty order, you know. Save the world in one generation. But we can do it. Even if we are just a bunch of weeds. That name, the weed patch, is an incredibly apt metaphor. I think we all remember when we were dubbed that back in 10th grade and we all laughed at the obviously herbal connotations it implied. But I really don’t think that that was the idea in the mind of the individual when it was created, however. It was meant to ridicule and disgrace us. To make us feel like pests which were infesting the garden of last year’s lovely flowers. That name has haunted us for three years now and our teachers have never really taken us seriously. Because of it, we have been. hounded unnecessarily by the administration and made examples of on more than just one occasion.
And yet we’ve persevered. Through it all we have fought our way ahead because we are survivors. When all those lovely flowers have withered and died, we will still be here. Still hanging on. Still prospering. And that’s exactly what we’ll need in the rough years ahead. And those years will be rough, believe me. After all, look at the preparation we’ve had.
For the past 13 years we have slowly but surely been stripped of our minds and souls. For the past 13 years we have had our heads crammed full of useless facts and trivia, which have benefitted none of us. For the past 13 years we have had our creativity stifled and originality crammed into some forgotten corner of our minds, until that mind has become so atrophied from disuse that it has become naught but a useless mass of protoplasm which leaches upon our bodies.
All of you know what I’m talking about, whether you realize it or not. How often did you sit it a classroom, answer questions, read the textbook, take notes, gathering impressive sums of knowledge into those tiny little heads and then quickly and calmly forgetting everything the day after the test?
Teachers spend their time strutting across the front of the classroom, expecting us to be awed and thankful for their mere presence and anxious to learn everything which they deem important. But the students don’t care. That roaring flame of curiosity which should blaze brightly in every person’s head has been extinguished so long ago that most of us really don’t know what it’s like tp wonder. Instead of going out reading books of our own choosing, learning what we want and need to know, we sit by docilely and watch the world pass us by.
We let them win. And by doing this, by refusing to motivate ourselves because we’ve never been allowed to, we lose our originality, our individuality. What ever happened to ambition? Does anyone have any dreams, any goals any more? No. No, you don’t. Because we’ve been so conditioned so as to live our lives only for others and not for ourselves.
Did you ever wonder why you went to school every day? Was it because you wanted to learn or simply because you had no place else to go? There is no reward for going to school. The best we could hope for is that we’d ‘make the grade’. But you know, as well as I do, that grades do not reflect a person’s intelligence so much as his talent for bullshitting. Sure, you can get an A by working, studying, and actually learning something, but why bother when it’s so much easier to just play up to the teacher?
This goes to show another major flaw in young people today: a lack of morality, of the knowledge of right and wrong. This is due mainly to the misdirection of the schools. Instead of learning such concepts as truth or justice, we are taught to lie, cheat, and steal to get what we want. We learnt be ‘successful’. And within the process of becoming a success, we also learn that it pays to be conservative, to make no waves. The only way to do things is the same way they’ve been done for centuries. Any attempt at some type of creative constructive change is looked upon with horror and astonishment and those that think of them are ostracized and scorned by their peers. The only reward for actually thinking is to be regarded as a fool.
Perhaps the worst thing of all this is that it really isn’t our fault. We have grown up in a time which has seen an entire nation wake up from a slumber of complacency and see that the American dream was just that: a dream, an illusion, something unreal.
The 1960’s was a decade of revolution, of social upheaval in which an entire generation of youngsters looked at their world and said no, this is wrong. We don’t want pollution, we don’t want racial discrimination, we don’t want to fight wars that needn’t be fought. These brave young men and women fought for what they believed in and some of them even gave their lives for it. But in the end, things really didn’t change that much.
Look around today and you’ll see the same things which they fought against all around you. That revolution is now a forgotten one. The lofty ideals, the dreams of a return to paradise were all for naught. The young radicals thought they could change the world with words like love and freedom. But in the end, it seems that words were not enough. They cannot erase the hatred and bigotry which has so infested the minds of the world and today we have all forgotten what those dreams stood for. We look away, and say that the rebels were impractical, unrealistic. But then again, so was Thomas Paine. So was Abraham Lincoln. So was Franklin Roosevelt.
It seems to me that our generation could use a few more dreamers and a few less hard realists because without dreams, man can never change his way of thinking. And without them, our civilization will fall into stagnation.
During the 1970’s we tried to recover from the shock-wave of the sudden realization that America was not a utopian nation. The Watergate scandal taught us how much, or how little, we could trust our leaders. Oil companies and runaway inflation sapped our economic strength, while turmoil in Africa and the Middle East gnawed away at our confidence. It was, all in all, far from an idyllic scenario.
And now that both of these decades which helped to form our personalities and outlooks on life are gone, what kind of legacy have they left? We no longer seem to have any faith in ourselves or in our society. We are disillusioned because no matter which way we turn, we see the signs of what has been. Hard work, sacrifice, the entire Protestant work ethic upon which this nation was built, has become obsolete. Success is now more of a matter of who you know, than what you know. By success, of course, I am speaking of the kind of material importance which has come to define that word. You know, a big house in the suburbs, 3 cars, 2.4 children, and all the other trappings of a Hollywood paradise. But at the risk of using yet another cliché’, there is a far better, far more important type of success: that which lies in your soul.
We’ve all seen and met our fair share of hypocrites and liars. People who claim to want to help us, but in reality don’t give a damn about anyone except themselves. But it is important to realize that people such as this are evil. In a world like ours in which heroes and villains are so easily interchanged, a young person can not always distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. We are so encouraged to get ahead that our priorities are not always clear. Thus, it is important to remember not to sacrifice someone else’s happiness in exchange for your own. We can read about some ruthless man who will let nothing stand in the way of his dreams, and even admire him a bit, but who would actually want to be like him? Put yourself in the place of the men he has trampled, and see how admirable he is.
It is also important to remember that a true man or woman must embody all the skills and knowledge of an entire civilization. It is not enough for a doctor or an engineer to know only of his own field but he should also be well versed in literature, the arts, history, and a myriad of other subjects. Likewise writers, musicians, and the like should know as much as possible about the sciences.
In the past few decades we have seen a rift begin to grow, dividing our civilization into two separate groups, or as C.P. Snow put it, “into the two cultures”. It is almost impossible today to find any scientist or engineer who has read more than a sample of the world’s great literature. Likewise, what writer or musician can explain the 3 laws of thermodynamics, although this is similar to asking a physicist whether or not he can really read.
It is our duty, as a generation, to close this gap and reunite our civilization. We must do our best to see that we are knowledgeable in fields outside of our own, and that we restore the concept of the Renaissance man. In this way we will be better able to cope with the constantly changing world and better both ourselves and our civilization.
Thus, we head out into the world today, the living symbols of the dawn of a new era. The time in which we live is perhaps the gloomiest in our history, and we really stand little chance of changing it. And yet we must try. Or, rather, we must do. Because trying will not do us any good this time for if things do not improve, our children will not even get a chance to live their lives. The future holds for us many opportunities but there are also many pitfalls to be avoided along the way. We must be careful not to fall prey to greed or hypocrisy; for they represent mankind’s greatest enemies,
We have seen our ancestors build many a proud monument to the glory of the human race, and we must remember that greatness for it is the foundation of our civilization. But in the past decades we have seen the dark levels to which mankind can sink. We have seen our people consumed by their own selfishness and unconcern, and this dismal world is the result.
Our predecessors have perpetrated unmentionable deeds in their lust for power, justifying these disgraces in the name of progress, and in the name of God. Our planet has been raped and it has fallen to us as her bastard children to set aright the natural order of things.
The past has shown us that when nature is disturbed she fights back until the harmony in which the universe was created is once again restored. But never before has she been subjected to the horrendous treatment which the human race has inflicted upon her in the past 2 1/2 centuries, and this time she just may need our help in order to recover.
As members of the human race, it is our duty to take responsibility for the crimes committed in the past and to rectify the situation as best we can. It is of course, also in our own best interest; for there is no place left for us to go. In the past, when a man grew tired of the place he was at he simply climbed over the next hill and started all over again. But we can’t do that anymore. There’s no more new frontier for us to spread into. We have got to make it right here. We must learn to live with ourselves, with others, and with our actions, something which man has had incredible difficulty in doing in the past. We must conquer our primal animalistic instincts, and to make the sacrifices demanded of us by a universe which has fathered us.
We must succeed. We hold the life of an entire planet in our sweaty little souls, and we have little choice but to succeed.
Good luck. Good luck to you, to me, and to everyone else out there. Because we’ll need all the luck that we can get. And let’s face it. Luck is about all we’ve got right now.