Text of My Commencement Address

As requested. Thanks again to those of you who helped me with this. On Friday, the day after, I was supposedly the talk of the faculty for my (paraphrasing) passionate, insightful speech. It has acquired the monicker "the cooties speech" for reasons which should be quickly apparent. Enjoy!

We are all different people. We all have different pasts and we will all have different futures. We all took different classes, did different activities, got different grades, and made different friends. It seems that everything we do is done to create difference. In high school, we are told that we are finding out about who we are. But I think that all along we have been determining who or what / we are not. We have been answering the question: How am I different?"

Let me give a simple example. I am an 18-year old American male. By implication, I am neither twelve nor twenty, Somali nor Swede. I am not a girl, and I definitely don't have cooties. The idea of cooties seems so petty and juvenile that we don't think about it every day--or at least not as much as we used to when they were an imminent threat to our continued health and safety. But cooties are as much a part of our way of thinking today as they were in those days. Those cooties stayed with us in the way we regard the differences of others. Tonight, I want you to think about cooties. More precisely, I want you to think about difference, and the power it has to shape our lives. In short, I want you to recognize cooties / wherever you find them.

The title of Roseville / Area / High School class of 2005 divides those gathered here from those everywhere else in the world at every other time in history. Our yearbook may say "United," but its pages are full of our many differences. Our whole high school careers, we have been creating difference.

The most obvious difference we create comes in the form of a number at the bottom of our transcript ranging from zero to four. The grades we earn are a form of difference. For those of us at the top of our class, earning high grades separated us from those at the bottom. When we spend a long night studying or volunteer an answer in class, we make a statement about who we are and who we are not. Those people who didn't behave like us, in effect, had cooties. The A students were A students in order to create difference.

But I know full well that most of us here were not A students. Despite our best or our worst efforts, not all of us graduated at the top of our class. There is difference in that, too. Many of us are just happy to be here, to graduate, to have completed high school at all. Completing high school creates difference from people who we don't think made the right academic choices. We give cooties to them. Earning C's and D's, many of you made statements that there are things you value more than the narrow learning of high school--and let's face it: what we learned here is pretty narrow. You chose late nights with friends, or even late nights with things of which your parents didn't approve. Perhaps you didn't want to be like the self-absorbed smarty-pants who always had all the answers. I don't know why you wouldn't want that, but making those choices created difference between you and whoever or whatever you didn't want to be. You gave those people cooties. You did whatever you did in high school to create / difference.

Tonight, we're all dressed the same way, but think about the clothes you'd normally wear to school. I've seen more exposed shoulders and belly buttons in the upper B-wing hallway than I'd care to count. I've seen people with metal-studded belts and dark trench coats. I've seen parts of people's bodies pierced that I didn't think could possibly be pierced. I've seen bright colors and dull colors, simple clothes and extravagant clothes, and even something close to no clothes at all. When we choose our clothes, we give cooties to the people we don't like, the groups we can't stand, and the expectations with which we don't agree. This is the way in which we create difference.

One of our requirements for graduation was to pass a basic reading test. Being able to make sense of dots and lines doesn't have any meaning on its own, but through our embrace of reading and writing, we give them meaning and value. Where we were once illiterate, now we can read. We have de-cootified ourselves, but at the same time we have given cooties to millions of children and adults. By celebrating our graduation tonight, we, like little first-graders, point at other people and say, "ewwwww, you have cooties; get away." We almost say that they aren't people / at all. They are just / outcasts: cootie-ridden fools who can't and shouldn't participate in our community.

Thinking of some people and things as having cooties protects us from the world. The meaning in difference comes when we act on difference. When we ignore or avoid people to whom we have given cooties, we give difference the power to guide and shape our every action and every word. [Note: at this point in the speech there were about half a dozen beach balls flying through the air, so I inserted, ad lib, roughly the following: "When we toss inflated beach balls through the air we make a statement that we don't agree with the administrative rules governing this occasion, but that doesn't make it justified, because..."]Fundamentally, exclusion, racism, violence, hatred, and contempt are all products of our willingness to give out cooties, to recognize difference.Now you must be thinking: There are so / many / ways to create and act upon difference that it is unavoidable. We can make anybody into an outcast because everybody differs from everybody else in some unavoidable way. That doesn't mean, however, that we have to treat them differently. The cliche goes "it's OK to be different", but what is more powerful is that it's OK to ignore difference as well. We ignore difference whenever we notice difference, but don't use it as a barrier. This is where difference can vanish.

We all heard the class ring presentation in tenth grade and you probably remember the packet they gave us afterward. Inside, there was an unending list of ring types and sizes. There were different stones, different metals, and different insignia. It seemed like there was something for everyone. Even people like me, who didn't spend more than a minute looking through the brochure before tossing it out, realized that the class of 2005, in and of itself, is not one single thing at all. There were so many ways to be different that marking the particular difference of being in the class of 2005 seemed almost ridiculous.

Making difference is about putting up walls. The class ring brochure taught us that it is possible to put up so many walls that there is no room to walk between them and we must instead walk on top of them, above prejudice and above difference. Recognizing the flexibility of difference makes acting on difference seem foolish.

ANYONE can have cooties. ANYONE can be different. One form of difference is no more meaningful than any other. The class of 2005 is nothing more and nothing less than a form of difference. Jock or nerd, goth or prep, insider or outcast, black or white, female or male, are nothing more and nothing less than forms of difference--difference which is fluid and impermanent.

We are all different people. We all have different pasts and we will all have different futures. It seems that everything we do is done to create difference. But one thing unites us all, the power not to be ruled / by difference.