Some graduation somewhere always features some speaker who tells the graduates that they are a special generation. This tactic is so effective that Pepsi has spent generations using flattery to break Coke’s hold on the market: “you are the generation that will do it.” This has yet to work out for Pepsi, but graduation speakers and the Pepsico keep using the line anyway.
Each generation is ,after all, new at the start, that being the way generations work. Each generation also invents something unique to itself. My own youthful time embraced leg warmers and parachute pants while voting for Ronald Reagan. This is a combination that will not, indeed cannot, come again. So in one sense, we were special and this generation of graduates is special. Nothing is so “special,” so dated, as the cool look of whatever generation happens to be the present one: absurdity justified by youth.
Of course, cranky old people like to pretend they are special as well. Just ahead of me the Boomers are claiming that they are changing “old age” though they still look old to me. As for those of us who are Joanies (if you could have watched Joanie Loves ChaChi you are my tribe), we are in the youth of old age. . . meaning we too are looking old in ways not so dissimilar to our parents in their fifties and without the dignity (hats! dresses! suits!) of our grandparents.
And so I am writing to warn you graduates that you should stay off my grass, the mosquitoes that live on my lawn would grab you and take you to their swamp home to drink your blood, and forget about being special at least for now. Here is a new goal: try for normalcy. At some point in the 1920’s Warren G. Harding bloviated this term to death, but being normal is still a good idea.
It’s a good idea because mostly you are are normal and the areas where you are not in the norm are usually not the ones that you should emphasize. We need a generation that will stop finding every odd thing in their nature and begin instead to know themselves truly. My parent’s generation took that Socratic dictum and turned into ways of finding out what made them special and outside the norm and as one would expect, they found it. Nobody would wish to return en toto to the generation before my parents (the Fabulous Fifties), but surely somebody has noticed the rise in depression and teen suicide? In the fifties, the goal was to “fit in” and despite much less sensitive child rearing practices, fewer kids killed themselves than in later generations.* Whatever “finding yourself” meant (meaning what was different and special and focussing on it), there isn’t much evidence it made us happier.
And, of course, Socrates meant (in part) that each of us needs to know our humanity and our place in the great plan of the cosmos. When we look within ourselves, we will find that we have more in common with other human beings than we have not in common. A great error of our time is to define self as unique instead of one of many that produce a common humanity. We need not deny difference, in fact we can rejoice in it, but our difference is not nearly as important as our sheer normalcy. The brightest and the least bright humans have brains that are individually more complex and interesting than the entire cosmos without a human brain in it. So it is with sexual differences: men and women are not the same. Men and women have overwhelmingly more in common with each other than they have differences. We should start with the commonality and then discover the difference. We are humankind! Having seen the differences, we can then forget finding the “ideal man” or the “ideal woman.” None of us is quite normal, but all of us are more normal than not. An alien from another planet would have a hard time picking us apart (on race, sex, or nationality)!
Of course, the idea of the “normal” (the canon!) can oppress and break the soul if used as a ruler. None of us are quite normal so if normalcy is a judgment, we will all fail. Our abnormalities will be fearful to us and we will hide them. Instead, we must view the normal as a general description that fits us more than we would like to believe. We are not so different from our grandparents, great-great-grandparents, or from Adam and Eve if we were to meet the original pair. We are just people after all.
Perversely, the generation ahead of mine that tried not to fit in is rigid and conforming in odd ways that have little to do with human nature. They have created new consumerist and social canons and woe be to the he or she who deviates from those culturally based norms. Nobody can ever be sure they are “cool” or have the “right views” for the elite they wish to emulate. We can be sure when we are being normal human beings . . . and so the old rule was more freeing than the new. We could see the norm in general human nature and see where we were different and chose to do what we did with the differences!
Graduates dress alike at these ceremonies and this is a good thing because graduation is about the community, not just the individual graduate. It is the accomplishment of the school, the class, the faculty, and of all the individuals that make up those groups. On graduation, we come as one to celebrate in attire that causes our individuality to vanish. We look like the rest of the graduates because we are one of that great number: those who taught by Alma Mater. Of late, some have taken to “personalizing” the look of their robes or the tops of their hats. This is not an evil thing, but it might not be so good for us.
Instead, I hope that graduation is a day where we fit into the traditions of those who came before us and establish a pattern for those who come after us. We should embrace our common humanity and aspire to the norm and not fly from it. We should embrace the normal as a tonic for the trendy, the tiring, the trite, and the truthless fads of each age.
We are not that special: thank God.
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*I am NOT trying to give the cause of the rise of teen suicide or explain why after increasing so quickly it leveled off in the last few decades. I am just pointing out that usual media culprits for teen suicide were at least as widespread in the 1950’s (or more so) and the rate was much lower.
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