If You're Within the Sound of My Voice

(tap, tap, tap) Testing, One, Two, Three. Is this microphone on? It is? Okay, good. I certainly hope all of you shiny and hopeful graduates of the Class of 2019 can hear me. If not, please put your hands up and I will feel sorry for you.

I realize you’re surprised that I’m your commencement speaker since I’m not on your programs. If it helps, you’re not nearly as surprised as Campus Security, who thought until I started speaking that I was still locked in a classroom. Surprise is one of the many spices of life and I believe we should always season to taste.

I’m teasing of course. I’m not really anyone’s speaker this graduation season, though there are certainly enough of them going on that, I might perhaps slide up near the microphone and be able to actually contribute to one or more, but probably not.

It’s okay as I’ve learned to be gracious about not always having my way and would encourage all graduates of any school in any year at any time to also be. As large as we like to think our globe is, with room for all, it’s more spacious when you learn to get along by going along, so let that lesson be one of my graduation gifts to you (and no, I didn’t keep the receipt so you’re stuck with it).

For most of my working life, I had a framed quote I attributed to Mark Twain. "Every day a child is born who will change the world,” it reads, “but we don’t know who that child is." My old neighborhood had a darn good idea which kid wouldn't be growing up to change the world and yet look at me now, struggling to change the subject.

Class of 2019, you’re going to hear a LOT about the promise you represent and the opportunities you’ll have and (with apologies to Dr. Seuss), the places that you’ll see. And those fine thoughts are absolutely accurate but they come with costs and prices that each of you must be prepared to pay because while you are like so many before you, you are also very different.  

You are the first graduates of American high schools born after 9-11. The world you have grown up in, defined as it is by that event, is frighteningly different from the one I and everyone else who’ll tell you in the next hours how they’d love to switch places with you.   

   

Your world will require skills yet to be developed to master technologies yet to be invented in a society not yet imagined. The one constant in all of the change you will face is you, and everything you have learned until now is just the start to what’s left to learn, to share, and to do.

You represent and reflect, good and bad, everything all of us are and what we hope you’ll be.  I won’t wish you good luck so much as good lives, well-lived with people you cherish and love, reshaping and sharing the world around you. You can do it. Now go forth (or fifth).

-bill kenny