“Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating right now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians, that’s 37,000 Class Presidents… even if you’re one in a million on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7000 people just like you. Iif everyone is special then no one is… If every one gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.”
Those are the words of David McCullough Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, delivered at his commencement speech to the 2012 graduating class. The combination of his compelling language and the brazen crux of his speech sent him into the media limelight recently when the speech was posted on YouTube.
He has a lot to say and knows how to say it. His audience was in an affluent town with an elite woman’s college, and his statement ran counter to everything that these pampered young men and women had been told continuously throughout their childhood.
What he brought up pointed out a conflict between the American emphasis upon individuality that is embraced by loving mothers, versus the grand scale of life, which is in a sense related to astronomer Carl Sagan’s humbling “pale blue dot” frame of mind. Everybody wants to be the pale blue dot rather than merely a pale blue dot.
We tend to suppress the reality that is the scale of the universe and are apt to give in to the enticing compulsion to incessantly feed our egos.
Entertaining the idea that we are not special can lead to apathy but McCullough was wielding the idea to get exactly the opposite reaction.
“My intention was a little hyperbolic drollness to get their attention so they would be paying attention by the end when I told them what I really wanted,” McCullough said in a CBS interview.
Perhaps it was the superficial media’s attention grabbing headline emphasis that led to the underevaluation of the speech, and to the many scornful reactions. His firm stance was not against individuality, but more against a widespread sense of inherited entitlement.
“Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction,” he said, “…Climb the mountain not to plant your flag but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
He finished the speech in a much more traditional way, with words that a lot of graduates will hear this month, and not the ones which garnered him all the attention. “Selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself, he said. “The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special – because everyone is. Congratulations, good luck. Make for yourselves, please for your sake and ours, extraordinary lives.”