It’s great to be back here at my alma mater to share this special day with you that commemorates the culmination of years of effort and sacrifice. I thank you all for taking the time to listen to me and I promise to follow the advice a classics professor once gave a commencement speaker: “Pretend you’re Socrates on trial in Athens”, he said. “Be clever but be brief or everyone’s going to be thinking, “What that know-it-all needs is a cup of hemlock.”
The purpose of a ceremony, like today’s, is to slow things down and give us a moment to reflect. It gives you perspective, helps you understand what's important and what's not.
Looking out into this beautiful crowd, I see our nation's future. Despite all of the difficulties that confront our world at the moment — and they are many and varied — despite all those difficulties, I am confident about the future. It has seemed to me that in many areas of society, it's a common belief that progress will happen naturally, on its own, and that as time goes by things will change and are changing for the better. Your generation is coming of age with greater idealism, and just in time.
All too often, we follow people simply because they have commanded us to follow; they prompt us to put aside our doubts because they are decisive and because they are so sure they are right. Well, there will be times when you will feel betrayed. We see the lies, we see the obfuscation, the deception. Those days hurt. We still wait for answers; we may never get those answers. But you, you have met the challenges, overcome the obstacles, played the right hand and now you are prepared to enter the game. Learn to see hats of chicken feathers as crowns in disguise. A peach is not its fuzz, a toad is not its warts, a person is not his or her crankiness. Not a bad metaphor for life.
Strive for success and remember you won't get what you want unless you want what you get. Success in life, with all its hot competitions, is rather a contest like some of the games of Olympia and some of the athletic feats of our own times in which the swifter runner or the more skillful oarsman may win the prize, but there are honors and cheers, there are places and rewards for those who fail in securing the supreme positions. Don’t be lulled into the complacency of accepting a future or path that’s just okay and mediocre. But to choose well, you must know who you are, what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.
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