Can there be a more-futile exercise than a commencement speech — or, for that matter, offering advice to soon-to-be-newly-minted graduates?
Teenagers, no doubt dating back to the initial batch, consider themselves to be smarter than adults. And who knows, maybe they're right.
It's we adults who, generation after generation, make a mess of the world and then, when we've grown too tired to try to fix what we've wrought, turn it over to the next generation, like we're handing them the rind after having finished off all the good of a watermelon.
We're probably being too hard on those who speak at graduation ceremonies. In most cases, what they're saying, the message they're trying to get across, is heartfelt — they're earnest in their desires to be of help as teens start to transition into adulthood.
Unfortunately, what's said in many commencement speeches (or offered as advice, for that matter) is wasted on the young.
It's just that, at that moment when teenagers are first exposed to the subject matter of a speech or the unsolicited advice of an elder, their minds are generally off somewhere else.
“A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
We can't help but imagine that Longfellow came up with that line while listening to a commencement speech.
Actually, what we've heard said in many recent commencement speeches is better suited for the anxious adults fanning themselves in the bleachers rather than the teenagers eagerly fidgeting in their chairs down on the gym floor.
From time to time we can all stand to be called to account for the lives we're living — or not living — and the advice we've heard offered to teenagers during graduation ceremonies sounds pretty good for the rest of us.
Maybe that's the way it should actually be, that the speakers aim not at the charges they're about to release into the world but at their parents, who have spent the last 18 or so years trying to get along in this wearying world as best they can, and sometimes stumbling,
Commencement speeches have a tendency to bring adults up short, to cause them to consider how well they measure up to the advice being offered to their teenagers.
For isn't the best thing an adult can be is a role model?
Adults have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
So, we're going to drag our soapbox out from the storage shed and once again climb up on it to complain about the fact that the Indiana High School Athletic Association will, once again, be playing tournament baseball games on Memorial Day.
Time and again over the years we've heard the specious reasoning as to why these games have to be played.
But the hard truth is, these games DO NOT HAVE TO BE PLAYED ON MEMORIAL DAY, no matter what the IHSAA claims, and it's an insult to veterans and their families that they are.
Public school officials are complicit in this. They could say no, that they're not going to have their student-athletes participate, and that's that.
Let's not lecture high school graduates on one night of the need to honor veterans and then turn around and disrespect veterans and their families by forcing those same graduates to play games on Memorial Day.
We need less talk about what's right and wrong and more definitive action demonstrating right from wrong.
We need adults to be role models. That's our advice.