Year 2012

“The relevant life”

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

It was Friday afternoon when I saw the headline and giggled a little to myself (no need to let everyone else in on what I was doing).  It struck me as funny that a commencement speaker told a group of graduating high school seniors that they weren’t special, that someone had gifted the graduates with a surprise package of honesty such as they likely don’t receive at home.

Today, I looked at the video of that speech and was surprised—pleasantly—when I found that the people who wrote headlines about the “buzzkill” commencement speaker had missed the whole point.

This is not some blowhard scrounged up to give a graduation day speech: he is Wellesley High School’s own veteran English teacher David McCullough, Jr., son of the historian, apparently a well-respected member of this upper class community in Wellesley, MA.  (He’s given the faculty message at graduation before, said some of the same things six years ago!)  If you watch the people in the background and listen to the other sounds, you see and hear a lot of laughter and head-nodding agreement with where he’s going in this speech—telling the students that “if everyone is special, then no one is” to shake them out of their certificate of participation-filled, everybody-gets-a-trophy world.

…we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point—and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece…

(snip)

No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it; now it’s “So what does this get me?”

McCullough’s lively and humorous talk isn’t mean-spirited at all.  He is serious in telling his students that they’ve been coddled by their parents (and the school and American society, to an extent) but those days are over, but his message comes out of love for the kids, and what I think is the right-headed realization that we’ve got to wake them up and stop spoiling them if we wish them to be successful and contributing members of society.

I also hope you’ve learned enough to recognize know how little you know..how little you know now, at the moment, for today is just the beginning.  It’s where you go from here that matters.

(snip)

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer.

And without preaching, he spreads the word: do great things but don’t do them for yourself—do them for their own sake, or for the sake of others.

And then, you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself; the sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special, because everyone is.

Look at who else must be a socialist, too

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Last week Fox News CEO Roger Ailes said in a speech at Ohio University that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart had told him some years ago that he (Stewart) was a socialist; Stewart was on vacation and didn’t offer any response/defense/denial. ; It seems that no one got too terribly worked up about this “accusation” against an entertainer, although I’d half expected the Fox News Commentariat to hyperventilate into unconsciousness over the revelation. ; (They may have; I don’t watch, so I don’t know what they did (or didn’t) do.)

Now Stewart’s back from vacation and last night he did respond, staking out what it is that he does believe in, absent the simplistic and obfuscatory labeling that supplies so much of what passes for political analysis today…and, naturally, he found a way to use that explanation to (1) point out the hypocrisy among the conservative extremists considered among the leaders of today’s Republican Party, and (2) make me laugh. ; What more do you need? (Click the pic)

image

Thank you, Comedy Central.

Memorial Day

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Please take three minutes and click here: look at these two remarkable photos; read this thoughtful essay; give a thought to those of our fellow Americans who were lost while picking up the tab for the lives we enjoy.

It is impossible to be unmoved by the juxtaposition of the eternal stone-faced warrior and the disheveled modern military wife-turned-widow, him rigid in his dress uniform, her on the floor in her blanket nest, wearing glasses and a baggy T-shirt, him nearly concealed by shadow while the pale blue light from the computer screen illuminates her like God’s own grace.

(snip)

I believe that the civilian-military gap isn’t always born of indifference, but rather, at times, a sense of helplessness on the civilian side. What can I do? If you do nothing else, you can remember those who have given their lives for their country. Our country. Remembrance, which may seem a modest contribution in the moment, is a sacred act with long-term payoff — a singularly human gift that keeps on giving, year after, year after, war-fatigued year. I don’t need to remind you that America’s sons and daughters are still dying in combat. I don’t want to browbeat you into feeling guilty for not doing more. Instead, I want to tell you that as the wife of a veteran, it is tremendously meaningful to know that on this Memorial Day, civilians will be bearing witness and remembering in their own way — that those who are gone are not forgotten. I also want to say that as you remember them, we remember you.

The Gospel According to Calvin and Hobbes

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Lots of last-minute unavoidable changes made for an especially hectic day at work; I grow more and more fatigued of reading about the political impasse without any real promise of light at the end of the tunnel; they say this is the hottest start to a year since they started keeping records here 120 years ago; and then Bill Watterson reaches out from the past to hit the nail on the head.  Thanks, I needed that.

Calvin

Thanks, GoComics.com.

Bravo, Mr. President

Pat Ryan 3 Comments

Let’s see now: I asked President Obama to take a stand…it was all the way back to, well, yesterday (see just below) that I asked if “anybody is ready to really show some leadership” on the issue of same-sex marriage by just having “the courage to publicly do the right thing.”  Today, the president publicly affirmed that he believes same-sex couples should be permitted to get married.  Thank you, sir.

To deny some Americans the right to marry under civil law due to their gender is discriminatory.  The fact that a majority of the states have constitutional or statutory prohibitions of same-sex marriage doesn’t change that fact, but even those barriers are likely to fade away as more people come around to the understanding that the prohibition is wrong.  Fact is, most Americans are live-and-let-live sorts who wish the anti-gay extremists would just shut the hell up and stop always trying to make everybody else live according to the rules of their religion.  Just yesterday the latest Gallup poll showed that half of all Americans believe same-sex marriages should be legal, and the numbers in favor have steadily grown over the years.

Was Obama’s announcement today politically brave?  Maybe.  Taking this stand isn’t going to change the minds of the religious extremists who make up so much of the conservative fringe that’s taking (taken?) control of the Republican Party: they hate him and are never going to vote for him no matter what he says, on this subject or any other.  From a political standpoint, those people are a lost cause.  This may hurt him among some less strident traditionalists who can’t go along with his stand on this issue, and now are lost from the group of independent voters who were still undecided; those numbers are pretty hard to calculate, though.

On the other hand, it has to help him among the gay rights supporters who voted for him four years ago and are disappointed that he hasn’t been stronger on the issue, despite his administration getting rid of don’t ask don’t tell and stopping any government support of the Defense of Marriage Act.  And it should help him among some independents who feel that taking a stand on a controversial issue deserves to be rewarded; the numbers there, too, are tough to add up.  Maybe his campaign numbers-crunchers have already done that, and maybe they think that this will be a net gain for Obama in November; we’ll see.

(One lesson here: despite the characterizations his enemies use, Barack Obama really is a very moderate and middle of the road politician. If he was the big liberal the conservatives claim he is he’d have started pushing gay marriage years ago.)

In either case, Obama has shown us that he can be a leader: he’s taken a stand that he knows is not universally popular and run the risk of political harm…time will show whether or not he can persuade America to the rightness of his position on this issue.  Now, he did take his sweet time about doing it—he was very cautious, and put his toe in the water with all that “evolving” crap to see what would happen.  He could have kept his mouth shut and waited for the issue to settle down and disappear again in a week or two, as it surely would have done.  But he didn’t.  Good for him.  Good for us.