My Commencement speech to a college graduating class

Thanks you for the honor of inviting me to speak to you as you wait impatiently to pick up your diplomas and rejoin your families.

You are about to go out into the world. At other college commencements graduates are being told to “find your voice,” to fight injustice, to go beyond expectations, to change the world. Most often they are told that they are the future leaders. And that’s true but it’s also a tautology. People older than you will die and you will be left. Some of you will lead the others, and I pray for your sake that you will choose more wisely than some of our generation have.

At this point you will have to make a decision about the rest of your life. To listen to our current President and his wife you should not go into business or industry, but join one of the “helping” organizations; to – in their terms – “give back.” So there are two ways you can go from here …

First, have a wealthy terrorist ghost-write a couple autobiographies to make you some start-up money. Join a corrupt political organization and work your way up the ladder, but vote “present” on any controversial bill. Practice, practice, practice your TelePrompTer delivery. Get a wife and find her a job with a hospital dependent on state aid that will create a high paying job that does not require her to do any work. Become the affirmative action President. Get free room and board in a huge white house with servants and jet planes on standby. Retire with a magnificent pension after four to eight years.

The second option is to become a bricklayer. No, no, I’m serious. I just asked a bricklayer what he would charge to fill in some mortar on my front steps. With the right tools that should be a two-hour job, max. He said “$300.”

As you contemplate the future, let’s face it, it looks bleak right now. There are only so many job openings for President and this job is taken for at least the next few years … unless we get lucky. But there are lots of jobs for bricklayers. In fact, the country is short of bricklayers or they could not command such high prices. And in laying brick for people who can’t do it themselves you are “giving back” … right?

Most of you have been told that you should go out and “do good.” Well, who is doing the most good for the most people: the farmer who grows food, the trucker who delivers it, the grocer who makes it available to the public or the person who ladles it out in a homeless shelter? Why is it that it’s the person at the end of the line who gets all the “atta boys” for doing good? Without all the people who produce, ship and store things, the “do gooder” couldn’t give out a cup of warm salt water.

The people who make this country work, who keep us housed and fed, our cars running out computers humming, our streets and sidewalks repaired are like the servants in Victorian homes, absolutely essential and never noticed. Did you ever tell the plumber, electrician or my friend the bricklayer: “Hey, thanks for giving back?” How about the auto mechanic down at the dealer without whose expert help you would be walking? Would it ever occur to the graduates of Harvard or Yale that these people, by simply doing their jobs, are “giving back” more to their communities than all the community organizers ever did if they were laid end-to end? Were those “little people” to stop working, the lives of the grandees would be “nasty, brutish and short.”

If the men who pick up our garbage stopped work for two weeks we would have a serious problem, if they went out for a month there would be real danger of an epidemic. Let the President take off for a few week or a few months and the country would not notice unless the press reported it.

Here in Virginia, the legislature is in session from the second week in January through the second week in March, a total of 60 days. The rest of the time they go home to their real jobs. That’s when Virginians feel safer.

So to the graduates today, you probably are going to be unemployed … and frankly those of you with degrees in art history or literature or Womyn’s Studies are unemployable. You don’t know a damned thing that’s useful to keeping this society going. Rather than turning to your parents to buy you a Master’s Degree and delay the job search for another few years, go through the yellow pages and look under “bricklayer.” Call them and see if they will teach you something useful. Think of it as “giving back.”