High School Graduation Address
Transcript:
"Advertently or inadvertently, everyday we make choices. We choose between the truth and lies. We choose between kindness and cruelty. We choose between generosity and greed. More than our age, the color of our skin, our gender, or our wealth, these choices are the definition of who we are, and our combined choices have a cumulative value which determines our quality of life. This is true on every level: local, national, and global.
Our generation, like generations before, has been presented with a unique set of challenges, some of which include older challenges still unsolved - issues ranging from global warming, to human rights, to food security, to privacy around technology, to the national debt.
In many ways, these challenges require the diligent, scholarly work of young people to become experts in their area. The Hazen Class of 2018 has plenty of diligent scholars who will make great contributions to progress. But as much as our community and the world will depend on diligence and scholars, it will most significantly depend on the small choices each of us make every single day. We won’t solve the challenges of new technologies, climate change, or the national debt unless we are prepared to confront each day with an awareness of each other and a conviction to the truth.
My senior year at Hazen has been marked by a slew of new experiences. I played varsity soccer with a group - which, for the most part - is as good as they come. And this was a group that chose teamwork over showmanship. I sang in the Select Chorus, and this was a group that worked in harmony even when dissonance was part of the song. I was on a debate team with partners I could both rely on and challenge. The work of all these groups remains distinguished because together, we were better.
When I first came here, I was something of a crusader for my own righteousness, and while on occasion I moved people to agree with my views, as I began listening more carefully to the words of others, I was forced to reflect on where my own thinking began: what did I believe in and what did I stand for? During my years at Hazen, I have begun to learn the answers to those questions. I have learned as much from my peers as from my teachers. And while I’m fortunate to have had such outstanding teachers, and even more importantly to have had great friends, I’ve also been lucky enough to have classmates with the courage to choose truth over lies, kindness over cruelty, and courage over cowardice. In a year that was deadlier for school-children than for service members, there were students across the country who had the courage to walk out of school in the name of gun reform, some even in conflict with their administration. With reluctant approval from our own administration, many Hazen students walked out--a movement which, in the spirit of civil disobedience, would have been followed through on, with or without the blessing of the powers that be.
As we go forward, the path we travel will continue to test our ability to make the right choices and to find answers to challenges and to questions not yet known, but we who are leaving Hazen today already have a time and place that we can look back on to help us remember how to make the right choices. We will have memories of friends who taught us the meaning of those subjects that were never graded, but were the most important subjects of all: character, values, integrity, and how we can serve a purpose greater than ourselves.
I’d like to close with an ask. I ask that you consider hope and all its optimism. That you consider choosing the truth where a lie or slight omission might--in a seemingly meaningless way--suffice. That you consider charity when it might be easy to look the other way. That you consider patience when the tic of the world’s clock demands haste. That you consider assuming good intent in the face of social friction.
The choices we make will write the legacy of the Hazen Union Class of 2018. And if we are true to ourselves and our values, these choices will be the wellspring of a newer, better community and a newer, better world.
Thank you to my classmates, thank you to my teachers, and thank you to this community for giving us, the Class of 2018, the opportunity to be all that we can be."
