An Address to the Graduates

I spent Saturday morning giving a commencement address, which is something I’ve never done before and likely will never do again so I figured I would post it here.

One of the high schools that sends students to the remote-access US1/US2 sequence that I’ve been teaching for the last decade asked me if I would be their keynote speaker and I thought that would be a lovely thing to do. And it was. I got to meet a number of former students in person for the first time, as well as my contact person there, and the address seemed to go over well. I hope they liked it.

This is the address as it was written. I’m sure that the presented version varied a bit – they always do, no matter how often you practice or how much detail you write things down in ahead of time.

Bonus points if you can find the uncredited references in here – brief allusions whose original source I would have cited if this had been a formal essay, but which in a graduation speech I figured I could let slide. By my count there are five of them.

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There is a certain irony in having a historian as your commencement speaker.

Historians, by our very nature, are backward looking creatures. We look to the past. It’s kind of the job description.

We try to see where things came from, what led up to things, how the world evolved from one sort of thing to another sort of thing. We try to figure out how we got here. We try to recreate the past in ways that the people who lived through it might recognize. We are most comfortable, in other words, with events that have already happened, whose outcomes are already known.

But if there is any day in your life where you want to be looking forward into the future rather than backward into the past, when you should be focused on things whose outcomes are not yet determined, it is your graduation day.

This is not the day to be reliving the old memories, though you’re going to do that anyway, and that’s okay. You have done much and achieved much to get here and you should be proud of that.

The mountain you have to climb is always looming up ahead, but every once in a while you should turn around and give yourself the credit for how far you’ve already come, to remember the ups and downs of the path that led you to here and now. The mountain will still be there, of course. It never goes away, and you still have to climb it. But it’s good to acknowledge what you’ve already accomplished

But take it from a historian – there will be plenty of time for old memories tomorrow. And if you’re on social media in any way at all you already know that you can never escape the old dramas, even if you wanted to.

The internet is forever, folks. You might want to think about that before you put stuff out there

No, today is a day to look to the future, not the past. To look forward toward the rest of your life and where it will take you, to look at things that haven’t happened yet but might, things whose outcomes are not already known, because it’s a big bright colorful world out there no matter what the headlines say.

Oh, the places you will go.

And all of that, of course, gets us back to the question of what I’m doing up here on a day that you should spend looking toward your future. What can a historian tell you about that?

Well, here’s the thing about history, which those of you who have taken history classes – especially if you took one of mine – have already figured out: History is just stories about people.

Yes, we talk about the big sweeping trends and the large ideological movements and the statistics and the cultural changes and the wars and the migrations and all of those things, but in the end those things are nothing but broad collective words we use to describe the stories we tell about the people who lived through them. It’s all just stories about people.

And there are all sorts of stories out there.

As a profession, we historians once told only the stories of the wealthy and the powerful, the big names and the bright stars, the privileged few who ran things and owned things and put their names on the buildings and the coins. And if that were all you saw you might end up believing that the world was made up entirely of old white men in expensive dark suits making decisions for everybody else

But in the last few decades we historians have figured out the simple fact that such people make up only a small minority of this country and an even smaller minority of the world as a whole and that other stories need to be told as well.

We need to tell the stories of the world’s collective majority too.

We need to tell the stories of women, who are after all 52% of this country’s population. We need to tell the stories of LGBTQ people, of non-whites, of the poor, the powerless, and the outcast. We need to tell all the stories if we want to understand the past as it really was and understand the present as it has actually become, and if we want to use those understandings to create the future that we should be creating. We need to tell all of the stories.

Including yours.

Because stories are what make us human, after all. They are, more than anything else, what separate us out from the other species with which we share this fragile planet. We become who we are because of the stories we tell about ourselves, and we pass along that becoming to others the same way, by telling our stories.

Before there were cities or governments or industries there were people sitting by the firelight telling stories, and when all that we know is changed there will still be people sharing stories with those around them. It was the first thing, and it will be the last.

Someday – and you’ll be surprised at how quickly this day will come, as the teachers, administrators, and parents in the audience will tell you if you think to ask them – someday, there will be historians studying you. I have reached the point now in my US2 class where I have a lecture that covers the year when I sat where you sit now, graduating from high school, and that lecture isn't even the last class of the semester! There are still classes after that!

Who thought that was a plan?

But someday historians will want to know about you. They will want to know how you lived. They will want to know the sorts of things that led up to the world you take for granted today. They will want to figure out how it got that way and where it led. They will want to tell your story – what you did, what you wanted, the world you created for yourself and for the people around you. And those stories should be told.

All of them.

So the question here for you today is what do you want your story to be?

You sit here at the beginning of your story but someday you’ll get to the middle of it, and eventually to the end. And what kind of story do you want that to be when it’s over?

You should think about that.

For some of you, it will be a bold story – a story of action and energy, of accomplishments and fame. It will be a story of how you became a leader and an exemplar among your fellow humans. You will speak of the work you put in, the decisions you made, the things you changed. You will describe the vision you had for that – the clear sense of what you wanted the world to look like when you were done with it and how you were willing work to get to know how things function, to figure out how to make them function better, and to seize the opportunities to do all that when those opportunities arise, because you will not throw away your shot.

Perhaps you will be a political leader. We need those now more than ever, after all, in this age of partisan fury. We need leaders who can make things work, for all Americans if you’re going to stay here in the US, or for all of the people wherever you end up if you go elsewhere, as many of you will. Your story can be that story.

Or you might be a scientific leader, grounded in the reality of the world rather than the petty ideologies that surround us in a dense fog of nonsense. You’ll make things better in concrete ways, solve real problems, find out how reality functions, and continue the grand Enlightenment experiment of trying to find our place in the universe.

Maybe you’ll be a cultural leader – a writer, an artist, a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, or such, someone who brings beauty and joy to this tired old world with words and sounds and motion and images, someone who can capture a moment and make the world see, really see, as if for the first time, in a way that it can never unsee.

Maybe you’ll be something else. There’s a lot of options.

Graduates, be bold, be daring, and be brave, and tell your story with all of the joy and excitement you can find.

For others of you, though, your story will be a quieter one – a story of relationships and small moments, of kindnesses and communities

Most people, pretty much by definition, are not leaders, after all. That’s just how the math works out. We can’t all lead the parade. Someone has to clap as they go by.

Most people live in a window that is five generations wide. We remember our grandparents and our parents. We are remembered by our children if we choose to have them, and perhaps our grandchildren. And after that we are forgotten. We are not remembered in the history books, but only in the hearts of those who knew us, and when they are gone so too are we.

And for many of us, this is enough. It is a smaller story, a quieter story, but it is a good story, and it is enough.

And while the quiet stories are often unheard and uncelebrated, the simple fact is that these stories are just as important as the stories of the leaders, and perhaps more so.

When Alexis de Toqueville came to the US from France in the 1830s – this is how you know you’re listening to a historian, by the way; I’m contractually obligated to throw in at least one historical reference into this talk – he toured the relatively new country to see what made it work and more than anything else, he said, what made the United States work was the strength of its communities. The passion that Americans had for volunteering in their communities, for taking care of the people around them, for doing the small, quiet things that make societies function.

This is something that we forget today at our peril. We live in a time when those small quiet things are not valued, and our society is having a hard time functioning. Imagine that. We need people who will do those small quiet things, and perhaps you will be one of them.

If this is the story you will tell, then it will be a story of community, family, and the people you love.

Perhaps you will be a parent or an aunt or uncle, passing on your family’s history from one generation to the next, taking care of the new generation as it rises up to replace us, because that’s what new generations always do.

Or perhaps your story will expand outward to those who aren’t related to you at all but who are simply part of your community – a found family rather than a blood family. Because families come in all sorts of varieties and family is family, after all, however it is formed.

It will be a story of your friends, your colleagues, your fandom, of all of the various people who make your stay on this planet worthwhile and how you live your days among them and help make their stay on this planet worthwhile. You will describe the vision you have for that, the clear sense that those who are your world will be looked after and loved and how you will work to make that happen, to make your home a refuge and your community a better place, to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves and take care of those who need to be taken care of.

Graduates, be kind, be observant, and be present, and tell your story with all of the thoughtfulness and care you can give.

For some of you, of course, your story will be all of these things, because they’re not mutually exclusive, after all. You can be bold and daring for the big things and still kind and present for the little things. The best leaders always are, and the strongest communities always do.

It’s your story, after all. You should tell it the way you want it to be told, and more importantly you should live it the way you want it to be told.

One other thing about stories that you should be aware of, though, is that very few stories have only one character in them. Your story will be part of many other stories, and while you will have the central starring role in your own story you will only be a supporting player in the stories that other people tell. You should consider how you want to appear in those stories, what role you will play in the stories of others.

A good place to start is just to treat people well.

Be generous with your time and attention, because the time you have with people is often surprisingly finite. This is something that old people like me know firsthand. The people who come into your life won’t be there forever, and you will miss them when they are gone. It is a complicated thing how your stories intertwine and circle back on each other. You probably never thought your high school career would end, that it would last FOREVER, and yet here you are, just waiting for me to finish so you can draw a line under the whole thing and move on. (Soon!)

Perhaps most importantly, though, be open to the idea that you don’t know what other people’s stories are or how you fit into them, and you may never know. This can be a humbling sort of realization – that there are things you will never and can never know, even about the people closest to you. Embrace that humility and let them bring you into their stories as they are able to do so, as you bring them into yours as you are able to do so, and remember that you don’t know what struggles others are facing at the same time they’re facing you, nor do they really know yours. All you can do is be open to learning.

Graduates, be generous, be open, and be humble, and tell your story with empathy for those you meet.

You are at the beginning of your story, and what you write is up to you. Your options are wider than you think and more important than you realize.

You don’t get the final say over your story, though. Sorry. It’s true.

You have no control over how other people will tell your story, and what you need to understand is that this is not a bad thing. It is a liberating thing. You don’t need to tell your story the way other people want, because you couldn’t do that even if you tried.

All you can do is live your life the way you think it ought to be lived, to do right as you are given the ability to see what is right, and to tell your story as well as you can so that those who come after you will know that you were here and – however bold or however quiet your life turned out to be – that you mattered.

Live a good life as you see a good life should be lived. Be brave and just and live the story you want to be told.

Because right now, right here, your story is just beginning and the outcome is not known. You have the chance to tell that story as you want it to be told so think about what you want that story to say.

“We are all just stories in the end,” said Doctor Who. “Just make it a good one, eh?”

Be as bold as you dare, as kind as you can, and as generous your life allows.

And on this day, when it is appropriate to look forward rather than back, when we stand at the beginning rather than the end of a story whose outcome is not yet known, go into your futures and write your stories with all of the blessings that a historian can give you.

Thank you.