Yet Another Commencment Address
Here it is, the opening of commencement address season, and
once again this year I've not received a single inquiry, much
less an invitation to give an address. But I'm not bitter.
No, I understand -- I'm not the sort of person to say what college administrators think graduates ought to hear. So once again I'm going to offer up The Commencement Address Nobody Will Ever Ask Me to Give, and hope you'll send it to a graduate.
It's an honor to be here at North by Northwest State, here in beautiful Wealthy Dead Guy Hall within Corporate Sponsorship Plaza. I'm here to pass along one key word to you on behalf of my generation: OOPS!
We didn't mean to screw up the world for you, and we hope you won't take it out on us by cutting off Social Security. Our blundering was strictly a series of accidents. Honest. Here's what went wrong...
My generation inherited a pretty sweet situation. As Americans we were beloved. And why not? The generation before us overcame the Depression and Hitler, then gave the world The Marshall Plan.
Our parents not only fought evil, but then picked both allies and enemies off the ground and gave them a Hershey's bar and the money to buy more of them. That generation, the greatest generation, opened up the world.
Our generation, the greediest generation, exploited that opening by seeking new markets and cheap labor. We put our manufacturing everywhere and taught everyone our technology. Then we came up with the idea of free information on the Internet, putting all our knowledge into databases that everyone in the world could use. And then the world knew what we knew.
So, instead of competing for jobs with your fellow graduates, you get to compete with the entire world. If there is anyone on the planet willing to work for less than you, corporate America will find that eager young employee and let him or her work eighteen hour days with no benefits. OOPS!
Another thing that went awry was opinion research. It seems like good business to so market research, to ask people their opinions in order to serve them better. But when government and media get businesslike, the result is the Focus Grouping of America, where the informed ask the uninformed for opinions, creating a massive industry of telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to know.
What that means for you, as recent college graduates, is that you were offered programs in which to study and graduate, not based on what wise and knowledgeable people understood was important to learn, but based on what degrees would be bestsellers in the market for student dollars. OOPS!
The good news here is that all of you with Communications degrees will be especially effective at making the case for living at home till you're forty.
What has my generation gotten right? Well, if you're a woman or minority, you now have a more-or-less equal chance at the sort of good corporate job that is disappearing. Plus, if you get one of those vanishing jobs, then there’s a good chance you can wear a polo shirt to it on Fridays. So we got that much accomplished.
As for you, you probably want to go out into the world and "make a difference." Odds are, you will end up making a sameness. College is a big bureaucracy that trains you to be a successful bureaucrat. You're one of those unique snowflakes, but when you're in a blizzard, who really notices?
If you're going to make a difference, you're going to have to be better than we are. What happened to my generation is that our ideals were purchased in a friendly take-over and those ideals were restructured to be more lucrative -- "Ideals" were broken up into "I" and "deals" and a lot of people got rich.
Now, my advice to you, is to learn from our mistakes. Let us be the power of a bad example. For good examples, look past us. Look past Donald Trump to Walt Disney. Look past Dr. Phil to Dale Carnegie.
The world is going to need people who can thrive in adversity, because that's what we've left you. However, that means that here is our legacy to you: the world is wide open for heroes.
2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
