If Commencements Told The Truth

Congratulations class of 2012.  It is my great pleasure and privilege to address you on this momentous occasion in your lives.

I know today is all about you, so I want to talk about me for a second.  This is also a momentous occasion in my life. Well, not so much momentous as depressing.  As I look out at all your fresh, young, and eager faces a few things come immediately to mind.  First, and this is the me part, I realize how old I am.  I seems like I was you just a moment ago. It is sobering to think that when you were born, the world had already traded in the awesome musical stylings of Mister Mister for Milli Vanilli.  This was a harbinger of things to come if ever there was one, but I can see from your faces you have no idea what I am talking about.

Anyway, this is your day.  Enough about me, I wish to speak about, well, more me.  Not me in particular, but my whole generation of "me's."  A moment ago, I said that when I look out at all your fresh, young, and eager faces a few things come immediately to mind.  One, I am old. Two, I owe you an apology.  Me and all the other "me's" of my generation.  We were your last chance and we blew it.

Most of you are graduating with mountains of debt with little or no prospect of paying it back anytime soon.  This may not seem like a big deal to you, but that is kinda our fault too.  Among the many things we have taught you is that it is perfectly fine to incur huge amounts of debt with no reasonable way to pay it back.  We taught you that you can borrow other people's money and that when things get rough you can either just walk away or wait long enough for the government to bail you out.  We taught you that it is perfectly fine to live beyond your means only to hand your bills to somebody else.  It isn't.  Eventually, somebody has to pay.  Guess what?  That somebody is you.  Now, that might not be so bad if there were lots and lots of you to pay for it, just a little for everyone.  But we kinda killed millions of little "yous" in the process, because we thought they might crimp our style.  Our parent's religion told us not to behave this way, but we were so sure we knew better. I will be the first to admit that we didn't think that all the way through.  Our bad. 

Me and the other "me's," we inherited a world that still cherished freedom.  When I was a young man of your age, the notion that the government would tell our Churches to pay for abortions and birth control pills under penalty of law would have chilled even the liberal among us.  What we didn't realize (or care) was that in our eagerness to always have someone else pick up our bills, we still had to make the payments.  Not in dollars, but in liberty.  You see, nobody really wants to pick up the bill for selfish people living beyond their means, so we needed someone, something, to make them do it.  Government seemed like the only choice.  And if the bill picker-uppers grumbled a bit, that was to be expected.  We just shut them up by calling them greedy and selfish.  And if they have religious sensibilities, we say things like "Your Church's social doctrine" requires you to pay for my mortgage, my medical bills, my X-Box and my Prius.  But every time we empowered government to force others to pay our bills, we gave that same government all kinds of power over us.  We may grumble a bit about it from time to time, but we still like the perks.

Now in fairness, as they said in our time, we didn't start the fire, we didn't light it, but we failed to fight it. (That's paraphrasing Billy Joel, oh nevermind!)  This started before we came along, we are victims of the system just like you.  Well, not entirely like you since we got to enjoy the perks and you will not.  Timing is everything.

So today, on the day of your commencement, you are presented with certain challenges.  We hand you an economy in shambles, mountains of debt which you cannot hope to repay, a massive social safety net into which you will be required to pay more and more but will likely never get to enjoy the benefits, a massive government equally voracious of your money and your liberty, and a culture of death that has already killed half of your generation.

But what is a commencement if not a call to begin.  You need to begin to fix these things.  You need to establish some fiscal and personal sanity in government and your lives.  You need to begin to wrestle back the freedoms we willingly gave up, even at the cost of blood.  You need to establish a culture that respects each and every life from conception to natural death.  And the only way you can begin to do these things is by putting your faith in a God we never taught you about. 

So commence, you have your work cut out for you.  Best of luck.  We are all rooting for you.  If you need us, we will be in Florida.  Oh and one other thing.  While you do all the things mentioned above, don't forget to keep the checks coming.  No matter what, we still need our checks.