Anna Quindlen Commencement Address - Grinnell College

Watch Part Two.
Created: May 23, 2011

Anna Quindlen remains unapologetic for leaving a mess and challenges the graduates of the class of 2011 to not only do better but to also consider what “doing better” really means. Credit: Blur Media Transcript

"Good morning. Actually, great morning. I feel honored to be the first from this podium to have the opportunity to offer my congratulations to the graduates of the class of 2011 at Grinnell College.

The more I thought about speaking to all of you today, the more I realized that the prevailing opinion is that my speech should be an extended apology. On behalf of the entire country, I think I was expected to say I was sorry that the economy had tanked during your college years, that the job market was looking lean, that the housing market had become uncertain. In other words, that we who came before you were handing off an unmitigated disaster. I’m not going to do that. I just can’t. I’m not going to say that I’m sorry for any of you, because I’m not. Because I think, perhaps, more than any college graduates in recent memory, you have an unparalleled opportunity to remake this country so that it is stronger, smarter and makes a whole lot more sense.

When American generations past felt dissatisfaction with our prevailing culture, with corporations estranged from both line workers and consumers, from politics held prisoner by polls and personal ambition, they had to fight a comfortable and deeply entrenched status quo. During the peace movement, the civil rights movement and the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s there was tremendous pushback from millions of average Americans who believed that world dominance, military might, segregation and old, familiar gender roles worked just fine. They didn’t want anyone blowing up the old ways.

You don’t have to worry about that. The old ways have blown up all by themselves, fallen under the weight of a system that was a Potemkin village of alleged prosperity and progress based on easy credit and crazed consumerism. A financial system in which it was possible to become rich and powerful while investing and trading in nothing at all. An information system paralyzed and sabotaged by the technology that was outstripping it. A political system for which too many held open contempt. A consumer culture making things that didn’t last and that people didn’t really need. What happens to a country that has developed the peculiar habit of shopping for recreation when it runs out of money? Well, it can either screech to a halt, or it can discover that its priorities need to be recalibrated, and that “stuff” is not salvation.

It’s as though America was a house, and at a certain point the roof was so leaky, the walls so bowed, the termites so widespread that it began to crumble. Now don’t misunderstand me; the bedrock is still there, the bedrock which too often we honor in the breech, but which we honor just the same. The bedrock of a free and fair society based on the constant and open exchange of ideas. But it would be a tragedy and a lost opportunity if all of you rebuilt and constructed a house that looked like what we had before, tried to build the same old house, which we now know was in large part a house of cards. Your parents, proudly here today, and their parents before them, perhaps proudly here today, understood a simple equation for success: your children would do better than you had. Ditch digger, to cop, to lawyer, to judge, that’s how I learned it as an Irish Catholic kid growing up. We’re now supposed to apologize to you because it seems that that’s no longer how it works, that you won’t inherit the SUV, which was way too big, or the McMansion that was way too big, or the corner office that was way too big. That you will not do better. But I suggest that this is a moment to consider what “doing better” really means.

If you are part of the first generation of Americans who genuinely see race and ethnicity as attributes, not stereotypes, will you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans with a clear understanding that gay men and lesbians are entitled to be full citizens of this country with all its rights, will you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans who assume women merit full equality instead of grudging acceptance, will you not have done better than we did? And on a more personal level, if you are part of the generation that ditches the 80-hour work week, and returns to a sane investment in your professional life, the first generation in which young women no longer agonize over how to balance work and family, and young men stop thinking they will balance work and family by getting married, won’t you have done better than we did?

Believe me when I tell you that we made a grave error in thinking doing better is mathematical, a matter of the number at the bottom of your tax return. At the end of their lives, all people assess how they’ve done, not it terms of their income, but in terms of their spirit, and I beg you to do the same even if those who came before sometimes failed to do so. And I beg you not to let fear define you. I have enough of a memory of this day of my own to know that at some level it is preposterous to say that right now. You should be afraid; of leaving what you know, of seeking what you want, of taking the wrong path, of not finding the path at all but simply muddling along. Your friends are going in one direction, you in another. From this safe and beautiful place, you pass through an estuary to the great ocean and sometimes, the current out there is harsh and the riptides are rough, and you will be afraid. But you have to learn to put the fear aside, or at least to refuse to allow it to rule you, because it’s fear that tamps down our authentic selves, turns us into some patchwork collection of affectations and expectations, morays and mannerisms, some treadmill set to the prevailing speed of universal acceptability, the tyranny of homogeny, whether the homogeny of that straight world of the suits, or the spiky world of the avant-garde.

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don’t listen to them. People are going to tell you what you ought to think and how you ought to feel. They will tell you what to read and how to live. They will urge you to take jobs they loathe themselves and to follow safe paths that they themselves find tedious. Don’t do it. Only a principled refusal to be terrorized by these stingy standards will save you from a Frankenstein life made up of others’ expectations grafted together into a poor semblance of existence. You can’t afford to do that. It’s what has poisoned our culture, our community and our national character. No one ever does the right thing from fear and so many of the wrong things are done in its shadow. Homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, xenophobia – they’re all bricks in a wall that divides us, bricks cast of the clay of fear, fear of that which is different or unknown. Our political atmosphere has been so dispiriting because so many of our leaders are leaders in name only. They’re terrorized by polls and focus groups, by the need to be all things to all people, which means they wind up being nothing at all. They’re afraid, to be bold, to be decisive, to be inventive. If they were, they might lose. As it is, they have often lost their way. Our workplaces are full of fear; fear of innovation, fear of difference. The most widely used cliché in management today is to “think outside the box.” The box isn’t just stale custom, it’s terrified paralysis. If at work you ever find yourself uttering the sentence, “We’ve always done it that way,” I urge you to wash your own mouth out with soap and start fresh."

Watch Part Two in the video above .. it ends SOOOOOO well!!