If you've been paying attention to right-leaning media since this time yesterday, you've heard this question: Does the Supreme Court's ruling on "Obamacare" signal the end of America as we know it?
Answer: Of course it doesn't. We already knew that the People are being smothered by an intrusive federal government.
It does, however, in this independent citizen-patriot's opinion, mark the end of our country as it was founded.
See, even if the Supreme Court's decision mobilizes Liberty-loving citizens to deny Pres. Obama a second term, or even to press our elected officials to "repeal and replace" Obamacare -- a dumb idea, swapping one big-government program for another -- it establishes precedent at the highest level of the federal judiciary. With a single ruling, the Court cleared the way for our bloated government to regulate and tax not only what we do, but also what we don't do.
(Somewhere, HRH Michael Bloomberg is toasting his unexpected windfall with expensive champagne.)
The damage is done. There's a deep gash in our founding principles, hemorrhaging Liberty.
July 4th, the day that we celebrate independence, is less than a week away. America is still the best and freest country on Earth and I will, indeed, celebrate that -- but I'll do so on Wednesday with tears in my eyes, knowing that our liberties are, perhaps, mortally wounded.
The Supreme Court today affirmed that the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a "Obamacare," doesn't violate the Constitution -- not because it's permissible under the Commerce Clause to compel citizens to purchase a product or service, but because Congress has the power under the General Welfare Clause to levy taxes.
What was sold to the People as a penalty, not a tax, has been upheld as a tax, not a penalty. It's a distinction without a difference, either way, and now it's settled law.
Chief Justice John Roberts, whose siding with the 5-4 majority confounds me, concluded the Court's opinion with this:
"The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people."
Limited powers? My ass -- not any more.
This landmark decision fundamentally transforms our nation. It unleashes a government of virtually limitless reach.
It's dark day for the People, a very dark day for Liberty.
The other day I happened upon an essay entitled, "The Gun as a Weapon of Education," written by one Edward Cave and published in a 1918 edition of The Outlook.
The headline was intriguing, certainly, but the subhead hooked me:
"Lessons from the Long Trail that Goes 'Way Around Beyond the Bleak and Barren Mountains of Mere Marksmanship to the Happy Valley of Sportsmanship"
Knowing of the author's connection to Scouting, I scanned the piece for a mention. These lines jumped out at me:
"A couple of years before the Germans turned loose their war, for eight months I disturbed the pious and pacific calm of the National headquarters of the Boy Scouts with the rude idea that Baden-Powell, the British soldier who originated the Boy Scout idea, meant their slogan, 'Be Prepared,' to imply prepared to carry a gun, not a harp."
That, my friends, is absolutely priceless. Cave continued:
"Despite instructions, I drilled my troop of Boy Scouts, and drilled them hard. Since then I have had the satisfaction of vindication on both counts. In addition, I have had the satisfaction of helping a good many thousands of Boy Scouts and plain ordinary boys to learn how to shoot a .22 rifle properly. I joined the National Rifle Association of America and the United States Revolver Association, and recently induced the former to encourage boys to take up target-shooting outdoors with the .22 rifles."
Cave's assertion that he influenced "a good many thousands of Boy Scouts and plain ordinary boys" was no idle boast -- in 1915 he published Boy Scout Marksmanship, a seminal work on the subject and a valuable primer for boys within and beyond the uniformed ranks.
Later in the text, I chuckled at Cave's expressed intent to "square up some old accounts" -- that is, to needle certain types of people that he found particularly annoying. Specifically:
"Folks who are afraid of a gun, but otherwise all right.
"Folks who will not let a big-enough boy have a gun.
"Folks who are fond of roast chicken -- and, if necessary to get it, would chase a pet rooster till red in the face and chop his head off -- yet raise objection to all hunting, and are classified among wild life conservationists as sentimentalists.
"Pacifists -- the worst of the lot."
That passage is another keeper, for sure. Cave closed his engaging essay with this:
"Far away on the horizon you see what at first appears like a fog in some distant valley. It is the smoke pall above some city, and it reminds you, hunter that you are, of the vaporings of the city men you know who can never stand where you do, nor even rise above their droll little chimneys, yet presume to force upon their fellows their narrow conception of a world outlook.
"Poor little wall-warped and roof-stunted boys who were never allowed to have a gun!"
"The Gun as a Weapon of Education" is a fun read -- playful and unapologetic, relevant despite its advanced age. I recommend it.
Long before the Winchester Junior Rifle Corps was launched in 1918, "schoolboy" rifle-marksmanship programs were conducted by the Boy Scouts, the National Rifle Association, the Public Schools Athletic League of New York City and various other organizations.
Remington, as far as I know, didn't push a club of its own during those years. Its advertising took a different tack as well.
"War Department Offers Rifle Shooting Medals to Boys," from a 1917 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, is an example of Remington's approach. It used the lure of government-sanctioned marksmanship awards, along with the credibility of the Boy Scouts and the NRA, essentially to soft-pedal the brand. An excerpt from the copy:
"Another thing -- you don't have to shoot any special make of rifle and ammunition to compete for these National Medals. You can use any make of .22 caliber rifle and .22 short cartridges.
"We hope, of course, that you will select Remington UMC. Certainly you will, if you ask advice from men who know."
Two years later the W.J.R.C. was on the scene. Remington adjusted its pitch accordingly.
"News Indeed for the Young Man and his .22" popped up in a 1919 issue of Collier's. The ad's subhead -- "Individual Shooters Recognized by N.R.A. -- No need to join a Club" -- was an appeal to youthful independence and a shot across Winchester's bow. Later, this:
"Now don't hesitate to write us just because your rifle or ammunition is not Remington UMC. You don't even have to tell us what make you do shoot -- now. We'll take a chance that you will come to Remington UMC as your skill develops and you become more critical about your arms and ammunition."
And so the two companies exchanged volleys, vying for young shooters, their skirmish lasting nearly a decade. Which one prevailed?
Remington is still around -- it's the oldest company in the U.S. still making its original product, the oldest continuously operating manufacturer on the continent, the only American company that makes both guns and ammo here in the U.S. and the largest domestic manufacturer of long guns.
Winchester, which always struggled, sadly (or mercifully) is gone.
The W.J.R.C. had a successful nine-year run before it was absorbed by the NRA. Its descendant, the NRA Marksmanship Qualification Program, continues to thrive.
[This irresponsible decision by the Department of Homeland Security reflects callous disregard for the People and stunning political arrogance. What are they doing to our country?]
Homeland Security suspends immigration agreements with Arizona police
The Washington Times
The Obama administration said Monday it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws, and said it has issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline many of the calls reporting illegal immigrants that the Homeland Security Department may get from Arizona police.
Administration officials, speaking on condition they not be named, told reporters they expect to see an increase in the number of calls they get from Arizona police -- but that won't change President Obama's decision to limit whom the government actually tries to detain and deport.
"We will not be issuing detainers on individuals unless they clearly meet our defined priorities," one official said in a telephone briefing.
The official said that despite the increased number of calls, which presumably means more illegal immigrants being reported, the Homeland Security Department is unlikely to detain a significantly higher number of people and won't be boosting personnel to handle the new calls.
"We do not plan on putting additional staff on the ground in Arizona," the official said.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Arizona may not impose its own penalties for immigration violations, but it said state and local police could check the legal status of those they have reasonable suspicion to believe are in the country illegally.
That means police statewide can immediately begin calling to check immigration status -- but federal officials are likely to reject most of those calls.
Federal officials said they'll still perform the checks as required by law but will respond only when someone has a felony conviction on his or her record. Absent that, ICE will tell the local police to release the person.
Officials said they had concluded the seven agreements they had signed with various departments in Arizona weren't working and took the Supreme Court's ruling as a chance to scrap them.
[Read the complete article here.]
"After [Arizona v. United States] was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants under the age of 30."
"The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since the considerable administrative cost of conducting as many as 1.4 million background checks, and ruling on the biennial requests for dispensation that the non-enforcement program envisions, will necessarily be deducted from immigration enforcement. The President said at a news conference that the new program is 'the right thing to do' in light of Congress's failure to pass the Administration's proposed revision of the Immigration Act. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so.
"But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind."
"...There has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States' borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive's refusal to enforce the Nation's immigration laws?
"A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court's holding?"
"Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty -- not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State."
(U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from the Court's majority opinion in the case of Arizona v. United States. Read the Opinion of the Court here; Justice Scalia's scathing 22-page dissent begins on page 30 of the pdf document.)
"Our environment is full of way too many temptations. This is one temptation that isn't really necessary."
(Henrietta Davis, mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, one-upping HRH Michael Bloomberg of New York City by proposing to ban not only large-size sugary drinks in the Cambridge area, but also -- brace yourself -- free refills. Oh, c'mon now -- so that's a proper role for government? What the hell is wrong with these people?)
My fascination with vintage ads, especially those promoting firearms and outdoors gear, continues. I'm especially drawn to depictions of the Winchester Model 67, of course, like the 1956 ad that I posted on Friday, and to the Winchester Junior Rifle Corps.
First up this morning is "Add a Colt to Your Motoring Equipment," clipped from a 1922 issue of Life magazine.
In the early days of the automobile Americans were learning that their new-found mobility, however rudimentary by today's standards, quickly could transport them "beyond the reach of help." What Colt called "the growing menace of auto bandits and thieves" was a relatively fresh concern for the motoring masses.
The other ad I'll share today, "Don't envy the fellows who own rifles," comes from a 1918 issue of Arms and the Man, forerunner of the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman magazine.
Even though the readership of Arms and the Man was predominantly adult males, clearly Winchester's aspirational pitch also drew a bead on young boys. This line spoke to both audiences:
"Every boy wants to own a rifle, and every boy who has the right stuff in him should have one."
What American boy, after all, doesn't believe that he has "the right stuff"? And what self-respecting father would admit that he's raising a boy who lacks it?
The two-pronged approach is reminiscent, it seems to me, of another Winchester ad that I posted here last year.
Naturally, the ad includes the W.J.R.C. spiel. It's interesting to note that the program was taken over by the NRA in 1926.
One of yesterday's posts, "Nancy fails The Smell Test," included a link to "Nancy & The Big Shovel" as a reminder of who we're dealing with.
To recap, in May 2009 then-Speaker Pelosi was asked what, when, and how she knew about harsh interrogation tactics used on suspected terrorists. Her trademark blather bears repeating here:
"The point is that I wasn't briefed. I was told -- informed that someone else had been briefed about it."
"I wasn't informed. I was informed that a briefing had taken place."
"I was not briefed. I was only informed that they were briefed, but I did not get the briefing."
"I have not been briefed as to what they were briefed on.... I was just briefed that they were informed..."
Yes, that was three years ago -- but if any public figure deserves to have their self-inflicted wounds re-exposed, it's Rep. Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi of California's 8th district, Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives and member of the Democratic Party.
(Ok, Caribou Barbie comes close.)
If we direct our ire only toward Democrats or liberals, right-wingnuts or Republicans, however, we miss the mark by a Heartland mile. The real problem is politically entrenched ideologues of all stripes, elected officials who long ago ceased to obey the will of the People.
That's our fault -- we have the government we deserve.
"They're going after Eric Holder because he is supporting measures to overturn these voter-suppression initiatives in the states. This is no accident, it is no coincidence. It is a plan on the part of Republicans."
"These very same people who are holding him in contempt are part of a nationwide scheme to suppress the vote. It is connected. It's clear as can be. It's not only to monopolize his time, it's to undermine his name."
"It's really important to note how this is connected with some of their other decisions. It is no accident, it is no coincidence, that the attorney general of the United States is the person responsible for making sure that voter suppression does not happen in our country."
(Rep. Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, speaking to the media yesterday morning. I know that intellectual honesty and critical thought are endangered, even extinct, but Pelosi's shovelful of unfiltered bullshit is perhaps the most tortured spin I've ever heard.)
(That ad, which featured the Model 67 just a few years before Winchester pulled the plug on its 26-year production run, appeared in the April 1956 issue of Field & Stream magazine.)
"['God Bless the U.S.A.'] is a country song. This is Brooklyn. This is not the country."
(Dina Rosado, president of the PTA for NYC P.S. 90, voicing her disapproval of the school's kindergarten class waving American flags and singing the Lee Greenwood classic near the school on Monday. A week earlier P.S. 90's principal, Gina Hawkins, barred the five-year-olds from performing the piece at their graduation ceremony, judging its lyrics "too adult" and offensive to "some people and cultures.")
This morning Pres. Barack Obama invoked executive privilege, expressing his resolve to withhold documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee -- and thereby from the American People.
The intent of the ATF's gun-running scheme was to manufacture public sentiment in support of unconstitutional gun-grabbing legislation. Once the ploy was discovered and the investigation began, Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice set about stonewalling and outright lying to the committee -- clearly a cover-up of the operation's built-in corruption.
Today's assertion of executive privilege, which historically has been used to shield the confidentiality of the president himself, changes the game completely. In short, it implies that knowledge of Fast and Furious -- or involvement in the official cover-up -- went well beyond the DOJ, all the way to the White House.
Think about that.
Rep. Darrell Issa, who chairs the House committee, has been relentless in pursuit of the truth about Fast and Furious, and I admire his tenacity. Soon his committee will vote on citing Holder for contempt. There's only one proper outcome of that vote, of course, but the process shouldn't end there.
First, the People need to know what's in the documents now being withheld. More important, every elected official, unelected bureaucrat and political appointee who participated in subverting the Constitution -- and I mean every last one, all the way to the White House -- must be sent packing.
"If sales figures mean anything, the faster a .22 can shoot and the more rounds its magazine can hold, the more popular it is with American hunters. Just why that's so is kind of puzzling, considering the animals hunted, the ranges involved and types of shots normally offered. Most targets are relatively small; more are taken under 50 yards than over; and the majority are standing or sitting rather than moving.
"Admittedly, when a cottontail dashes hellbent for the nearest cover, a repeating rifle makes it possible to correct an improper lead or make up for poor range estimation and put a quick second or third shot where it counts. At least, that's so theoretically. From my own experience, and from what I have observed in the field, follow-up shots, especially those rapped out in short order, seldom put meat in the pot. My second .22 sporter taught me that many decades ago.
"My first was a Model 67 Winchester, a single-shot bolt action with a 27-inch barrel and open sights. If the first shot missed, the bolt had to be opened (ejecting the spent hull), a new cartridge pushed into the chamber manually, the bolt closed again -- and then the striker knob had to be pulled back to cock the action.
"Slow that action might have been, but memory says the rifle was deadly accurate. Of course, boyhood memories tend to mellow with time, but I remember quite clearly that whenever some serious shooting was in the offing, my buddies preferred to borrow my rifle instead of depending on their own.
"That old Winchester also taught me that if I took a few extra seconds aligning sights and target, there usually wasn't any need for a second shot."
(From Al Miller's "Rimfires" column in the September-October 1994 issue of Rifle magazine)
(I clipped that image from page 26 of Two Faces of Communism, a comic book published in 1961 by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade of Houston, Texas; the organization is still around today. In the first frame, dig the Commie foreman with the buggy whip.)
Now that I have your attention (or Catholics' attention, at least)...
In 1947, as the Cold War dawned, the Catechetical Guild of St. Paul, Minnesota published Is this Tomorrow: America Under Communism! It's a graphic snapshot of the paranoia that marked those years.
The Roman Catholic church in the U.S. was most concerned about religious persecution, of course, but the Catechetical Guild used the comic's plot to weave a tapestry of fear -- racial strife, confiscation of guns, indoctrination in the schools, dictatorial rule and more.
Fundamentally, Is This Tomorrow collected everything that Liberty-loving post-war Americans were afraid of -- rightly so -- and ascribed it all to a bogeyman called "Communism."
If the Catholic guild's extremist strategy sounds familiar, it should.
In our own time, Liberty is under siege. Yes, the threats are real. Our challenge is to think critically about what we face, to separate facts from fears and to act in the best interest of the country we love.
[By the way, Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine has posted scans of all 52 pages of Is This Tomorrow -- click here.]
(Adapted from the now-iconic "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda poster, produced during World War II by Great Britain's Ministry of Information. For some entertaining background on the poster, click here and here. To create your own parody, click here.)
"If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday."
(H.L. Mencken of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936)
This is today's big news -- so far, anyway -- as reported by Reuters:
"The Obama administration will relax enforcement of deportation rules for young people brought to the United States without legal status...."
"U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday that illegal immigrants up to 30 years old who came to the United States as children and do not pose a risk to national security would be eligible to stay in the country and allowed to apply for work permits.
"'Our nation's immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,' Napolitano said in a statement. 'But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case.'"
It's a transparent attempt to pander to Hispanic voters and the open-borders crowd -- no doubt about that.
Despite what we're hearing from the Right, however, the move isn't illegal. It's not unconstitutional nor is it dictatorial. And although it does award de facto immunity to more than a million young illegal immigrants, granting them an official blanket exception to existing work-permit regulations, it's not amnesty per se.
Immigration law hasn't changed -- this is an enforcement decision. It's the federal equivalent of a local police department choosing how to allocate its finite resources, something that happens every day.
It's also shameful disregard for the will of the People.
The new DHS policy is wholly unacceptable to this independent citizen-patriot. It reflects the Obama administration's indisputably poor grasp of both economic issues and national security. Worse, it smuggles the ill-conceived DREAM Act through the back door.
In that sense, the action announced today is extra-constitutional, yet another example of the federal bureaucracy operating beyond the reach of representation.
That isn't in the best interest of our country -- but then, this is about election-year politics, not governing.
Each time I re-read the faculty commencement address delivered on June 1st by English teacher David McCullough, Jr. to the Wellesley (Massachusetts) High School class of 2012, the more I realize that sharing it via KintlaLake Blog is the right thing to do.
Here it is, unabridged -- enjoy.
Dr. Wong, Dr. Keough, Mrs. Novogroski, Ms. Curran, members of the board of education, family and friends of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen of the Wellesley High School class of 2012, for the privilege of speaking to you this afternoon, I am honored and grateful. Thank you.
So here we are... commencement... life's great forward-looking ceremony. (And don't say, "What about weddings?" Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent... during halftime... on the way to the refrigerator. And then there's the frequency of failure: statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that'll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)
But this ceremony... commencement... a commencement works every time. From this day forward... truly... in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, you will stay forever graduated from high school, you and your diploma as one, 'til death do you part.
No, commencement is life's great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume... shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you'll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma... but for your name, exactly the same.
All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.
You are not special. You are not exceptional.
Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you... you're nothing special.
Yes, you've been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You've been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You've been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we've been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you've even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you've conquered high school... and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building...
But do not get the idea you're anything special. Because you're not.
The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can't ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee... I am allowed to say Needham, yes? ... that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that's just the neighborhood Ns. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That's 37,000 valedictorians... 37,000 class presidents... 92,000 harmonizing altos... 340,000 swaggering jocks... 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you're leaving it. So think about this: even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. Imagine standing somewhere over there on Washington Street on Marathon Monday and watching sixty-eight hundred yous go running by. And consider for a moment the bigger picture: your planet, I'll remind you, is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists assure us the universe has no center; therefore, you cannot be it. Neither can Donald Trump... which someone should tell him... although that hair is quite a phenomenon.
"But, Dave," you cry, "Walt Whitman tells me I'm my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!" And I don't disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality -- we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point -- and we're happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that's the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it... Now it's "So what does this get me?" As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It's an epidemic -- and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune... one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School... where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said "one of the best." I said "one of the best" so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You're it or you're not.
If you've learned anything in your years here I hope it's that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You've learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice cream... just an fyi) I also hope you've learned enough to recognize how little you know... how little you know now... at the moment... for today is just the beginning. It's where you go from here that matters.
As you commence, then, and before you scatter to the winds, I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance. Don't bother with work you don't believe in any more than you would a spouse you're not crazy about, lest you too find yourself on the wrong side of a Baltimore Orioles comparison. Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read... read all the time... read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations, and you'll be in no condition to enjoy the ceremony attendant to that eventuality no matter how delightful the afternoon.
The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you're a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer. You'll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- quite an active verb, "pursuit" -- which leaves, I should think, little time for lying around watching parrots rollerskate on YouTube. The first President Roosevelt, the old rough rider, advocated the strenuous life. Mr. Thoreau wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all the marrow. The poet Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil. Locally, someone... I forget who... from time to time encourages young scholars to carpe the heck out of the diem. The point is the same: get busy, have at it. Don't wait for inspiration or passion to find you. Get up, get out, explore, find it yourself, and grab hold with both hands. (Now, before you dash off and get your YOLO tattoo, let me point out the illogic of that trendy little expression -- because you can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than You Only Live Once, it should be You Live Only Once... but because YLOO doesn't have the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn't matter.)
None of this day-seizing, though, this YLOOing, should be interpreted as license for self-indulgence. Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It's what happens when you're thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you're not special.
Because everyone is.
Congratulations. Good luck. Make for yourselves, please, for your sake and for ours, extraordinary lives.
