Us and Them

 Week Twenty-two: Us and Them

Us and them

And after all. We’re only ordinary men

—Pink Floyd, Us and Them, from the album Dark Side of the Moon

Commencement ceremonies are being delivered all around our country, and each one comes with a motivational speech designed to not only congratulate the graduates but moreover to motivate them to use their accomplishment to contribute to society, to do great things. Such speeches can vary from truly memorable like Ted Geisel’s (aka Dr. Seuss) 75 second rhyming masterpiece (see below) to football player Harrison Butker’s controversial, rambling admonition of Catholic priests which included his advice to the female graduates to become “homemakers.”

David Foster Wallace told graduates that “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.” His speech at Kenyon University has been described as meandering. At several points in the speech he referenced suicide, which as it turns out, was his fate.

In 2005, Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates that “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” He praised death as “The single best invention of life.” According to Jobs, “(death) clears out the old to make way for the new, (and) right now ‘the new’ is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become ‘the old’ and be cleared away.” He told them he was sorry to be so dramatic, but he assured them, “it is quite true.” (Reminds me of Country Joe’s Fish Cheer, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!”)

Graduation ceremonies have featured speakers of all types from comedic to morose, from serious to sad. World renowned orators such as Winston Churchill and John Kennedy, Barack and Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison have shared their wisdom, and in 2024 documentarian Ken Burns had his turn. Speaking to the graduating class of Brandeis University, Burns delivered a masterpiece. 

Making his opinion perfectly clear regarding the impending presidential election filmmaker Burns told the graduates, “I have intentionally crossed the imaginary line of objectivity with regard to the peril the United States faces as a result of the 2024 presidential election.” He did so by quoting such luminaries as Mercy Otis Warren, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Louis Brandeis, James Baldwin, Mark Twain, and Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” Lincoln asked rhetorically if we could expect to see a foreign “military giant… crush us at a blow”? He continued, “Never… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

In his beautifully written speech Ken Burns described the privilege of making films about us, “that is to say the two letter, lower case, plural pronoun. All the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our'' and all the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US.”

He summed up the end result of his body of work by saying, “And if I have learned anything over the years, it’s that there is only us. There is no them.” He followed that with the advice that if anyone suggests otherwise “run away!”

His advice was not limited to how to react to those who would reduce life to binary options. He told the graduates:

• Be curious, not cool

• Insecurity makes liars of us all

• Grief can make you stronger

• Do good things

• Help others

• Leadership is humility and generosity squared

• Don’t confuse success with excellence

• Do not descend too deeply into specialism

• Educate all your parts, you will be happier

• Do not get stuck in one place. Mark Twain told us “Travel is fatal to prejudice.”

• Vote

Burns closed with this:

Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. The kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination. Try to change the unchangeable human nature of Ecclesiastes*, but start with you. “Nothing so needs reforming,” Mark Twain once chided us, “as other people’s habits.”

* Pleasure, materialism, wisdom and money are all futile and folly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLhKJuGhK0

Ted Geisel’s 1977 commencement speech to the graduates of Lake Forest College. 

Full text

My uncle ordered popovers 

from the restaurant bill of fare.

And when they were served 

he regarded them with a penetrating stare.

Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom 

as he sat there on that chair:

“To eat these things,” said my uncle, 

“you must exercise great care.

You may swallow down what’s solid 

BUT you must spit out the air!”

And as you partake of the world’s bill of fare 

that’s darn good advice to follow.

Do a lot of spitting out the hot air, 

and be careful what you swallow.