Muhlenberg Commencement Address, 22 May 2005 by Lorene Cary

Thank you, President Helm. Thanks to the Muhlenberg faculty, administration and board of directors. And congratulations to the Class of 2005.

You’ve completed the requirements for graduation at the same time that you’ve run through three college presidents in four years. I don’t know what you did to them, but I am relieved to see my friends Randy and Pat Helm “still here,” as poet Langston Hughes would say.

Now, for the next few minutes, I ask you to pay strict attention. Not to me, per se, but to this moment in you own lives. In ten minutes, they’ll start calling the names, and then Bam, it’s over.

But now, bookmark this moment, if you can. Rough up the surface of your memory so that this moment will snag there and stay with you. Adulthood calls us to be the boss of our own minds. What do you feel now? What do you see and hear and smell? Our often undisciplined minds think like three year olds taking a walk. Your mind is thinking now. Isn’t it? Remember this.

You can tell how important this moment is in our shared community by noting the ritual with which we surround it. These tents and alumni gatherings, these newly planted beds of bright-colored annuals; the procession and music, the European cult garb from the Middle Ages: this is ritual. Pay attention, it says.

And these station wagons and minivans of family rolling in—wondering what in God’s name would make you pierce a perfectly good tongue; or why it would have been so hard for you to keep kosher, what with Hillel so convenient, very nice food, nice people, what’s not to like?; diva aunties swishing in late to every ceremony; tired little cousins begging for rest and attention; all sorts of family members so proud and so impressed with how you’ve grown and what you’ve accomplished already that they just can’t get a grip on talking about it.

Let us please acknowledge your families, their work and love and investment, with grateful applause.

We create an amped-up swivet of activity, and then we punctuate it by solemn, very slow—dare I say really boring?—assemblies together. This is not by mistake. We are burrowing the significance of this moment down past our conscious minds and into our resistant reptilian brain stems.

Naturally, you remember 9/11’s tragedy. This ritual helps you choose to remember a day of blessing and abundance. As at a wedding, we ask you to make public vows of future behavior, and we hope you’ll remember in years to come what you promised.

Will you live according to our deepest values, we ask? Do you take this education and vow to use it well?

You’re supposed to say: I do.

Fabulous!

We delight in your energy, strength, inventiveness and wit. We renew our vows today as we watch you take yours. We charge you to go forth as professional and political adults: to be fruitful and multiply.

At Dartmouth College a few years ago, the late Fred Rogers slowed the time brilliantly by having students take a silent moment to think about teachers who had helped them get to this point. For professors who went beyond instruction to connect—you, not just what you know, but who you are—you are their legacy. See them in your minds for a moment, please: in the classroom, in the lab, on the field. See in your mind the custodian who took time to talk to you about when you fouled out of the last home game. Please take a moment of silence to remember and bless them for their care.

At a wedding there must be a toast. Bill Cosby put it succinctly at a commencement he and I shared once at Colby College. Randy Helm was there, too, when Cosby said with brilliant clarity: “Get a job! Your parents are tired. OK? They’re broke. Just give everybody a break, and please, go out and find yourself a job.”

Indeed, weddings are about love and money. It may seem rather a vulgar note to sound in the shiny blue of this Sunday morning, but it’s real. In the last four years you’ve received in excess of $100,000 worth of education, and now, you’ll go out into the world demanding to be paid for skills that that money has bought you. Over your lifetimes this class will generate billions of dollars of economic activity.

Native Pennsylvanians call it a common wealth. It was once and still is a radical idea. In the 1600s, many believed that the greatest threat to cities, and therefore European civilization, was fire. London had come up with fire assurance companies, as you know, but the whole place still burned down about 20 years before William Penn took over here.

London was not about common wealth. The custom was that several fire companies would show up at the site of a fire, but only the company that had insured that particular house fought that particular fire. When the next house caught, the company that covered that one would join in, and so on.

Ben Franklin, who headed the fire insurance company called the Philadelphia Contributionship, noticed that this practice allowed fires to grow in intensity until they became too big and hot for anyone to put out.

So he proposed a radical new business practice with radical cultural effects: whoever shows up first starts first; everyone else joins in as quickly as they can. In this way, fires would never build enough heat and momentum to get out of hand. Property damage and insurance pay-outs for all companies were kept to a minimum. Everyone made money. They also saved lives.

In the 21 st Century, post 9/11, we continue to need a hard-headed and radical vision of the common good. That’s what Muhlenberg College has been about in your life. The mission statement says so: by now you should be independent critical thinkers, with a zest for reasoned debate, equipped with ethical values, prepared for lives of leadership and service.

Why? Because: If there is no justice, there will be no peace.

We deny it, our American comfort making us logy like after a rich meal. We can’t be bothered. And yet, it’s still true: No justice, no peace.

We need alternatives to a public education system that leaves 40 million Americans unable to comprehend a newspaper. We need alternatives to a so-called system of justice that imprisons one out of 32 Americans, and controls more young black men than are enrolled in higher education institutions.

About current American hemisphere trade talks, one economist suggests making Latin American countries index their minimum wage to half the country’s median income. That way economic growth would pull along workers at the bottom—and give them a stake in democracy. If we in the States were to create such an index, our minimum wage would increase by two dollars an hour. Think what that would do at Walmart.

No justice, no peace.

I want the parents and friends to know that fully 80% of this graduating class has engaged in service.

You’ve begun your work for the common wealth. We need you to help change the way we do business in America. This is a wedding; you’re grown, and I’ve got to tell you that the mortgage on democracy comes due every month. Your commitment to the common good—to professional ethics and political involvement—that, in the long run, will be our greatest national security.

Maazel tov and big ups to you all. The world is created new every day, and each of us is called to assist in its re-creation. Please take the weekend to kiss someone who has helped, and vow with the rest of us to make this wedding feast possible for someone who could not be here today.