JCC Your Speech to the Graduates

My son graduated from high school yesterday. Yes I'm that old. Anyway, my congratulations to anyone else graduating from high school/college/etc. this year.

If you have any words of wisdom you'd like to share with my son or anyone else in the class of 2014, please post them here, up to and including that entire commencement address you've had filed away for the moment you know is coming soon when you'll be asked to do one.

Thank you!

 

Be excellent to each other.

 

Welcome to the jungle, we're all gonna die.

 

When you get out there and you see how things are, we ask quietly that you do not judge us harshly. We were like you. We were young, and stupid. Unlike the generations before us, we had no self-inflicted orgy of genocidal madness to thin out our numbers, leaving you space to breathe and dream and hope. From our childhoods we awaited death: expecting natural selection by force of atomic apocalypse would check the Doomsday Clock, shrug, and reset this planet, finally giving the cockroaches their chance at enlightenment. But finding ourselves spared by a force unnamed, be it God or fate or Neumann's zero-sum game, we rejoiced too much. Unlike our grandparents, we all lived. Unlike our parents, we did not choose the path of idealism followed by hypocrisy. Rather, as Arthur C Clarke once named us, like Lords of the Last Days, we spent up and built an Internet and shared porn and let all the same crap go on that has gone on since money and power were around. All we can say in our defence is that unlike every generation that went before us, we recognise and admit we have no excuse. Like every generation that went before us, we are leaving the problem to our children, knowing, hoping, praying that you are smarter than we, that you might succeed where we failed. But we are hoping you recognise, as we did, too late, as Sting once wrote, that people go crazy in congregations but find their salvations one by one. And lastly we are hoping that, one by one, you adopt a new creed. Not the papery platitude of love thy neighbour, not the tired murmur that God will provide. We hope you adopt the creed a man of our fathers' generation gave us -- a creed that whispers in the wind wandering in stone gardens, where he lies, where we will lie, and where one day you will rejoin us: the only thing that gives the darkness meaning is each other.

 

Abandon all hope. You're welcome.

 

High school is the best years of your life. From here, it's all downhill, so cut the brakes and hit the gas, because it will all be over before you know it anyway, and, besides, you are invincible.

 

That was good until all the weird grunting.

 

The weird grunting made that speech.

 

Mainly because it's quoting from Rocky V or VI, I can't remember which.

 

No it didn't. He sounded like he was constipated.

 

It was a telling look into the psyche of a defeated warrior.

 

This. ALl of it.

 

Remember: nobody ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by... Wait, wrong occasion.

 

Ironically enough, I co-wrote a graduation speech last week.


And no, I'm not sharing. You are transparent, Jabbadabbadoo.

 

I've already written mine. Here's the opener, feel free to use it:

 

And here's the conclusion; feel free to use it.

So let us, your loving parents, leave you with two final words from the bottom of our hearts.

 

I would only say this: "Be sure to not quit any job you hate, but rather get fired from it. That way you can collect unemployment monies."

 

don't go to college it's worthless

 

Learn Mandarin Chinese

 

don't eat mandarin cheese

 

Jabbadabbado's son, remember these words carefully. You listening boy!? - A woman is like beer. They look good, they smell good, and you'd step over your own mother just to get one!

 

Learned that in1979

 

With translation.