Seven Generations: Commencement Address, May 6, 2005

SEVEN GENERATIONS: ADDRESS DELIVERED AT POLITICAL SCIENCE COMMENCEMENT, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, MAY 6, 2005 Francis A. Beer Welcome Welcome to all of you to the Political Science Commencement of 2005. Congratulations To all great-grandparents and grandparents here today. Congratulations on your contribution to this wonderful event. To all parents of graduating students here today. Congratulations also. Welcome to the first step away from bankruptcy and toward solvency. As a father of three myself, I feel your pain—and your pride. To siblings and friends here today. Congratulations on your encouragement to your brothers, sisters, and friends. To the 2005 graduates here today. Congratulations on your achievement. Today is huge. Are there any children or grandchildren of graduates here today? Congratulations on the happiness that you bring to this great event.  Between Past and Future: Seven Generations Our Native American predecessors on this continent said that, in order to know the meaning of any event, one should consider it in the context of seven generations. There is some disagreement whether this involves seven generations ahead or the current generation with three on either side, forward and back. Since I personally can’t imagine seven generations ahead, and I don’t think that many other people can either, I take it to mean three on each side of the present generation. Here, in Boulder, we are within a few miles of the Continental Divide. If we drive, or even better, hike the high, rocky ridge that divides America, we can look East to the Great Plains and, in our minds at least, out across the vast Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean. If we turn to the other side, our eyes cross the Western Slope, and our imaginations take us to the cliffs and beaches of the Pacific. In the same way, we can also look to either side of time’s divide to the generational watersheds that lie behind and before us. Here today, you graduates stand on a crest between past and future, where you can imagine what this graduation means from the perspective of your great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents who came before, on one side of time’s divide, and, on the other side, from the viewpoints of the coming generations who will sit in these same seats long after you are gone—your own children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Today, members of many of your seven generations have come to this special meeting place to be physically joined in the time and space of this room and celebrate your graduation. Great-grandparents and Grandparents The earliest of your seven generations, your great-grandparents and grandparents were born and lived in a time and place far different from today. They are members of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” Living through the first part of the twentieth century, as they did, meant that they experienced the challenges of the First World War, the Great Depression, and World War II. They also had to make do without television, the internet, and the Beastie Boys. From these challenges they forged the character that helped to make this country a major actor in the 20th century and created the modern world. They accumulated the cultural and material capital that helped you, today’s graduates, to be here today. Upon this solid foundation, you have built your achievements, and these generations are very proud of you. Parents The next of your seven generations, your parents, lived primarily in the second half of the twentieth century. Theirs was the generation of the post World War II period—the sporadic violence of the Korean conflict, the Cold War, and Vietnam. President Kennedy referred to them when he said that this “generation of Americans--born in this century,” was “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.” The members of this generation took their inheritance from those who went before and shaped it to their own vision. They were, again in President Kennedy’s words, “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” They traveled into outer space and invented much of modern technology. Just as important, they built you, providing the guidance and support, the daily love and caring, the vision and the nurturing of you that continues in this joyous ceremony. The Graduates You, the graduates, are of course the total center of attention, the honored guests, as we celebrate your experience at the University of Colorado. If you will cast your memory backward, you may remember that, when you arrived here, what must seem a lifetime ago, you eventually came face to face with the large engraved quotation on the facade of Norlin Library. George Norlin, one of the great Presidents of the University of Colorado, for whom the library is named, tells us there that “whoever knows only his (or her) own generation remains always a child.” Norlin’s epigram reminds us again of the seven generations, but it appears in a very specific context. It tells us that the library contains the writings, the codified thoughts, of past generations of humanity that are important to our understanding of who we are and of our place in the world. As your great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents physically represent previous generations here today, so the books in Norlin library virtually represent those prior generations—and many more—stretching backward in time to the beginnings of recorded history. They are, if you like, an earlier version of the internet, which has started to digitize these resources and make them accessible to all human beings everywhere. Your education here has enabled you to connect more deeply with this archaeology of accumulated knowledge that is a part of your heritage and truly to make it your own. You have traveled through the University with professors as your guides. They have put you in touch with this vast historical community of men and women who have thought and dreamed, creating the knowledge on which we all rely. At the same time, the University is much more than an historical archive. You have also worked with your professors in classrooms, studios, and laboratories, learning new knowledge at the cutting edge of critical and creative thought. You have learned there the knowledge and skills that you will need for the next part of your life’s voyage. You have also had the opportunity to work with our wonderful staff. Sometimes, when you were totally lost, Laura, Mary, Patti, Rita, or John may have rescued you. They showed you how to get into courses, meet graduation requirements, and even find Professors. You learned from them what may be the most valuable knowledge of all, how to survive in a vast bureaucracy. You yourselves have followed many different paths in the University. Some of you have stuck to the straight and narrow; others have taken what the poet Robert Frost, and many commencement speakers, call “the road less traveled by.” Some of you have wandered far afield, perhaps lingered too long at The Sink, heard T.S. Eliot’s “mermaids singing, each to each, seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back.” Whatever your path, you have done more than accumulate knowledge, more even than develop the critical and technical skills that will contribute to your material success—helping you to get the job and create the life that you want. You have used this time to emerge from the person who entered this university many years ago and to begin to create yourself as you authentically wish to be. You may remember the movie Superman. After Christopher Reeve gets through high school, he visits the icy northern Krypton campus--the time capsule provided by his father Marlon Brando--to learn his history and identity before assuming his rightful place in the world. You have made a similar journey to the mountain campus located in the People’s Republic of Boulder. It is hard to gauge the extent of your miraculous new powers, but, whatever they are, they are a part of your inheritance from prior generations. This inheritance that you have claimed with your own hard work over the last years, is formally recognized in this ceremony by all of us assembled here today Children, Grandchildren, Great-grandchildren There are few representatives present today from the next of your seven generations--children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After all, most of them don’t even exist, either physically or even in your minds. They are very far from the focus of your attention. Like Martin Luther King, your reaction to this day may simply be “free at last. Lord God Almighty, free at last.” Or, in today’s context, let’s party! Yet, at the threshold of your new freedom, I should like to ask you to go a little farther, to lean forward in your chairs and travel into the future. Of course all of you have immediate plans after graduation. There are parties, which begin as soon as you get out of this room. Then many of you plan to travel. There may be jobs waiting—in the government, the military, business, education, health, or volunteer organizations. Some of you will go directly on to graduate or professional school for more advanced education. There may be romantic partners, perhaps wedding plans. Yet--and I recognize that this is a startling thing to say--at a certain point, you will start a bizarre metamorphosis and turn, at least partly, into your parents and your grandparents. This would be very hard to imagine except for the fact that you have already noticed yourself performing familiar scripts. People may have told you that some phrase or gesture, some attitude or disposition, resembles your Mom or Dad, your Grandma or Grandpa. As you gradually assume responsibility not only for yourself, which is hard enough, but also for other souls in little and large parts of the world, you will relive the situations of your parents and those who went before—and you will understand those earlier generations better. These situations, which involve the interrelations of the seven generations, are the existential structure of the human condition. The stories and lessons that you have learned by osmosis from your family’s culture, as well as the more formal education that you have received here, are part of your behavioral inventory that will help you to cope and prosper. As you continue to discover and create your identity, you will incorporate your inheritance as you also separate yourself from it. You will learn to know yourself and your own generation, and you will meet and nurture the next generations. What you have learned here will become less abstract and more concrete. You may have to wrestle with family problems like getting other people to soccer practice and music practice and paying the bills; professional problems like finding your space in the world and building a career; social problems like foreign wars, the collapse of the dollar, discrimination, cultural and environmental deterioration. You will juggle all of these issues, as you decide which are most important for you to invest in and which must be set aside for another day. Your preferences and priorities will separate the world that you were given from the private and public world that you yourselves slowly make. In the first half of the 21st century, the preceding generations will fade away into the background. You will gradually become your own generation of leaders in the arts, the sciences, and the professions; some of you may achieve greatness. You will take the historical achievements of those who went before you and try to make a better world for those who come after. The knowledge and skills that you have developed at the University will help you to do that. Your political science studies will be particularly useful in helping you to decode and navigate the politics, the relations of power, that are a part of human relations at all levels, from the family to the globe. One day, you may find yourself sitting in a similar space, but in a different time, with a different role, with different clothes, in a different seat, perhaps even on this podium-- speaking to the class of 2055. The period between now and then—between the present and the future, between the dream and the reality—is the time when you will test your academic education in the world. You may today ask yourselves what did those who came before me do well; what can I do better to help those who come after? You can answer parts of these questions now. When you reassemble in this room--years hence, after having lived much of your lives--you may give different answers. As you sit in that distant graduation ceremony of 2055, you may be watching your own children or grandchildren--perhaps even some of your own students--graduate. You may look back to this bright day and ask yourselves many of the same questions that you ask today. Did I do the best I could with what I had? Could I have done better? You may also look forward and ask what lessons you have learned that you can carry with you into the next phase of your life? What can you tell the next generations that may help them on their own paths? The Ivory Tower and the Real World You are about to leave the ivory tower. The buildings are not all white, of course, except when sheathed with winter snow, but the mountain tops can shine sharply in the high blue Colorado sky, and the manicured lawns of this enchanted campus after a fresh rain can be lushly green. As in a fairy tale, suspended in time, isolated in space, ever since you arrived, you have been preparing to leave, taking your memories and your hopes, your new selves and your new powers, beyond the campus, to engage the life tasks that lie ahead in the so-called real world-- located on the non-ivory sides of Broadway and 28th St. This is finally your moment. Your time is now. You are ready. Speaking for all your professors, and all the seven generations, I can say that we are very proud of you. We wish you every success and happiness in the years to come. Whatever fortune may bring, we hope that you will return. You will always be a part of the University, and the University will always be a part of you. Welcome to the community of educated men and women. PAGE 10