Sam Smith, 1977 - In June 1977, I was asked to give a graduation speech - at John Eaton School where I had recently been president of the parents association. John Eaton was one of the first public schools in DC to add a 7th & 8th grade to a normal elementary curriculum, hence the somewhat odd situation of addressing a group of eighth graders at a graduation. Here is what I said:
When your principal, Mrs. Greer, asked me to give .this speech, I don't believe she realized how fitting and proper a decision it was. For eighth grade was a high point in my career - my criminal career some might say. When I got to ninth grade, I reformed. For example, I gave up smoking, although I could still perform the trick learned in eighth grade - holding a lighted butt under my tongue and flipping it into my mouth and closing my lips.
I have to confess that my recollection of early education is somewhat fuzzy. Except for eighth grade. In eighth grade I learned, as they say now, to deal with the system. Admittedly I didn't always do it very well. Sometimes we didn't deal very well with Mr. Brauniger, our math teacher, and he would make us do laps around the school building. We had more success with Mr. Gordon, our English teacher. I would later take another class from Mr. Gordon and realize that he was one of the great teachers. But in eighth grade he was just a challenge. You see Mr.Gordon was always late. for class. We would station a guard at the door of the classroom so that we could do whatever it is that eighth graders do when the teacher isn't around. Mr. Gordon caught on and laid down a simple but eminently fair rule. If he came around the corner and got the draw on you first as you stood in the hall watching for him, you would have to stay after school. If you could go "bang" at him before he saw you, you were home free. It was high noon every day at 11.
Then there was last period Friday, a study period. The only thing was that the teacher never took attendance. We had a little club in the eighth grade: we called ourselves the Society of Cruds. Our insignia was the creeping crud —ballpoint pen marks on the inside of our right wrists. Many members of the Society of Cruds were supposed to be in that Friday study period, but since our absence wasn't missed, we excused ourselves to take in the double feature at the movie nearby. Worse, we would send our smallest member in at half-price, and he would open the exit doors s othe rest of us got in for free. Another :member of our party would be the hat man, assigned to fill his cap with popcorn fo rus when the attendant wasn't looking. Wen ever got caught until the last period of the last Friday of the school year, this very hour of our last Friday 26 years ago, when, as luck would have it, a sub-stitute teacher showed up — and took attendance. It was, yes, the old gunslinger, Mr. Gordon.
Now before Mrs. Greer, Mrs. Parker,and Mr. Urqhart forcily eject me from the room, let me state that I am not suggesting how the ideal eighth grader should behave. But it has been my observation that being a teenager is filled with more than its share of hassles, terrors, and frustrations, and. it is perhaps reassuring to know that at least one totally disreputable eighth grader grew up to be invited to address a graduating eighth grade class.
Well, here I am half way through my speech and I haven't told you anything important, edifying, or useful — or maybe I have. Because one thing we adults do.to our children is conceal what rotten kids we were. And growing up is hard enough without feeling that everyone else does it without making a lot of mistakes along the way. So the next time some adult tells you that kids aren't as good or nice -as they used to be, you tell them, "No,they never were."
Now the title of my speech is "The Future Lies Ahead." This pretty much sums up what people are meant to say at graduations, so I thought I would take care of it in the title and move on to some other business. It has always seemed to me that graduation was a little late to be giving advice but perhaps a few random notes may be of some assistance. First of all: parents. They're middle-aged, right? And Peter Ustinov says, the trouble with middle-aged people is that they're too far away from either of the most important mysteries of life: birth and death. My father used to say that the reason that grandparents and grandchildren got on so well was because they had a common enemy. For myself, I think one of the problems with parents is that they never can decide whether you should be in the White House or in jail.They exaggerate both their expectations and their disappointments. But remember that most often this exaggeration comes from two sources: hope and love.
They have higher hopes for you than anyone other than yourself and this is nice. But you know your hopes often disappoint you and that's hard enough. It's even harder some-times to deal with someone else who has high hopes for you, and I'm sorry to say it doesn't end when you leave your parents. At 39, I still find dealing with other people's expectations very difficult. John Cage, the experimental composer, once said that when people finally approved of what he did, all they wanted him to do was repeat it. He wanted to try something new, but the pressure was to just do it over again. This kind of dilemma will follow you to your grave, so relax and learn to live with it.
Love is also a two-edged blade. It provides warmth, humanity, and comfort, but it also demands and takes. Remember that Mr. Spock didn't understand love because it wasn't logical. In fact, especially with your parents, its manifestations sometimes seem to border on mental illness. Which is why, perhaps, so many people go to psychiatrists looking for love. I can't tell you how to deal with this conflict except to recognize the unavailability of the free lunch. If you want to go through life with complete freedom, with unimpeded self-expression ,then you also have to be ready to go through life lonely. If you want to share in love and community and mutual support .then you have to be willing to give up something of yourself in return. Parents offer love and hope but in the process become like that definition of the English House of Lords — indefensible and indispensable.
Second, a note on being a teenager: Adults conform just as much as teenagers do. The problem is that teenagers are asked to conform to both adult and teen-age values at the same time. This can get a little confusing. But there's something else wrong with the setup. Adults tend to regard your age as the ragged, unruly end of childhood, rather than the beginning of adulthood. Go back a couple of centuries and you'll find 16-year-olds who were captains of ships and 14-year-olds who were serving as apprentices or doing a full day's adult work on the farm. You are capable of it, but if you were to drop out of school and try to find a job in what we adults strangely call "the real world," you wouldn't have much luck. Why? The truth is that we need people to stay in school as long as they can in order to keep the unemployment rate down. It is not our social system but our economy that has determined that there be no useful role for teenagers.
Now adults don't want you to discover this so when you start demanding something meaningful, they may give you freedom rather than responsibility,. and when the sort of aimless freedom that adults sometimes grant young people backfires in a car accident or a drug bust, we blame the teenager. It is, of course, stupid to ask young people to find purpose in life when the system is specifically designed to deny them a useful function.
Well, pretty much. If we ever get in a war again, you'll find the country suddenly finding a place for you —on the front lines. I would think a country that can trust its teenagers to defend it in time of war could find more useful roles for them in time of peace. But we adults won't fight this battle for you, although we have taken a few steps, like lowering the voting age. You've got to figure it out for yourselves and make us listen. And. you only have a few years in which to do it. Then, you, too, will be too old and may begin to stop caring.
Third, a note on failure: Everyone tells you how to succeed, but I bet you get damn little advice on how to fail —which is strange, because if you're normal, you're going to spend more time failing than succeeding. Try to learn the difference between the failure that comes from laziness, indifference, or stupidity and that which comes from other sources. For example, there's the failure that comes with trying to do something that you won't be able to do right until tomorrow or the next day or next year. Those of you who took part in the musical yesterday know what I'm talking about. It took many hours of voluntary failure to produce one hour of success. And now that you've succeeded you perhaps have the courage to fail again so you can succeed at something even harder next time.
Then there's the failure of the just cause. Most good causes started out as lost causes. If no one had been willing to fail at a just cause, we would still be fighting in Vietnam, eating at segregated lunch counters, and the women in the Eaton class of '77 would not be expected to go to college.
Finally there is the failure that is not yours, but the judgment of other people. Don't let other people tell you when you've failed. Listen to them, but not at the exclusion of your heart or own judgment. Other people are poor judges of your success or failure.
One last note: I'm sure people have asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" There are two things wrong with that question. First, I know and you know that you are right now. If you put off being until you're fully grown, you may discover that it's passed you by. Second, adults usually want you to respond with a noun: I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an investigative reporter. You can fool them by answering with adjectives like I want to be warm, useful and happy. It is, after all, those sorts of wants that will matter most in the long run. If what you want to be is only a noun, you'll probably end up like that, and the sadder for it. But if you pick the right adjectives, you can end up like Frank Skeffington, the political boss hero of The Last Hurrah. In the last scene he lies on his death bed and one of his lieutenants piously intones, "Well, the one thing we all know is that if Frank had to do it all over again, he would have done it differently." Frank Skeffington raises himself from his bed, looks the guy in the eye and says, "Like hell I would." And dies. Happy.
