'Tis the season for graduations, and I have to admit that even I, the dedicated spoofer of traditions, get a bit touched by the pomp of circumstance in a graduation ceremony. But why are people are willing to dress up in funny robes and hats, sit in stuffy rooms, listen to mostly predictable speeches, endure agonizing hours of read-off names and shuffling movement, for that small moment when they walk alone across the stage to receive their diploma? What is at the heart of a graduation ceremony? What is it that tedium and bombast cannot kill off?
I once gave a speech at a high school commencement, and I admit to giving in to the temptation for sound and flurry. But I think I understand why I did that. Americans have few ceremonies in their lives. This is an historical choice we made as a democratic nation, but I think the nation sometimes regrets that necessity. We fill in wherever we can: the national anthem at baseball games, a gush over foreign royalty. And our graduations. At a graduation we can dress up in robes and hats that have an ancient lineage (even if we don't know what that lineage is), wear colors that signify status and place, hear formulaic phrases with their assured pentameter, be laved by music.
But it's more than just a hunger for ceremony in general. It's a hunger for ceremonies of transition, some demarcation between the dependence of yesterday and the independence of tomorrow. Graduations are the most public reminders we have that an important change has taken place, some thing significant that should be paid attention to. Graduations are the last refuge of a generational handing-on, a place where the elders can have the last word and the youngers can have their first. In many ways graduations are a stylized parenting, a formal presentation of how families ought to work.
But there's also a more radical element here, something I wish would get more play at graduations. The elders have moved on. It's time for the youngers to get done what the elders did not, to seize the world and try to rectify what the elders have done to it. Too often the "transition-into-adulthood" theme of graduations is limited to telling students that they should be like their elders. The opposite should be said: Don't be like your elders. Be different and proud of the difference. Push for more change, more justice. Don't get old and safe too quickly. After all, if the students are simply being asked to be like their elders, then there's really no graduation at all, only a renewal of the current subscription. As Thoreau said in another context, "Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."
That's my graduation speech; now on to the parties!!
Smoking
A Quiet Of Breathing