By JAMES EIK
Staff Reporter
It was the speech heard around the world.
Last week, David McCullough Jr. from Wellesley High School in Wellesley Hills, Mass. gave one of those rare commencement addresses that will linger with the school's graduates for the rest of their lives. It was a work of prose that makes most writers look like amateurs – this reporter included.
Videos of the address are online and I encourage everyone to watch it.
McCullough focused on the notion that no one is special, because everyone believes they are. Everyone has their own idea of perfection, one that isn't going to be the same for any two people. At this very moment, there are 6.8 billion people living on the planet. That makes 6.8 billion individual views of perfection.
Throughout school, and even in college, I was exposed to the flawed philosophy that everyone was a winner.
It simply can't be true. Additionally, the message given was that as long as you participated, you got the green, orange or whatever color ribbon they were awarding. As long as you took part, they said, you were a winner.
Yes, it's good to know you gave it your all. That alone is worthy of an ice cream trip after a long game of baseball as a kid. But, the result of being doted upon and coddled creates a false reality of what equality really means.
That's because in life, we don't get equal outcomes. Only one applicant gets the job opening. Only one team wins the Super Bowl. There can be only one Highlander.
As McCullough said, the norm for parenting these days is to shelter children and emphasize their uniqueness. We're not supposed to criticize a child, we're not supposed to push them. Everything we do is for the children, and we're not supposed to hurt their feelings. This isn't a knock on parents, as even I was raised to be respectful and play nice. And, in my one-year little league career I got a trophy despite only getting one hit in the season which, since the fielder dropped the pop-up, should have been an error.
We dote upon the children, yet most of the students in a high school commencement haven't formally accomplished anything. That's why it's called “commencement.” It's the starting block. Where students go from there is up to them and their desire to turn their life into something.
But no one is going to step aside and just let them have at it.
In a better world, students at Wellesley and across the country would have heard those words long before their commencement ceremony. Unfortunately, standards have been lowered in a large part to boost our self-esteem. A C is now a B in classes, and jewelry classes are replacing English courses (I kid you not).
The way in life has become paved for many of today's population, and we no longer put effort into earning that top spot in life.
It all comes back to being an individual. In order to make your life special, you need to make it count. Every second spent watching that video of a squirrel in rollerblades on YouTube or being an intergalactic space conqueror on the Xbox is a moment lost.
Likewise, every moment we spend doing something we don't love, or spent in a place where we can't be selfless in some way, is time we don't get back. It calls for us to have a sense of urgency with things in life. Spend less time talking about plans and actually put them in play.
Congratulations to the new graduates. The hard work now begins.
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