Pomp under the right circumstances
By Bruce Watson
Published on June 15, 2007
No one asked me to speak at my son's sixth-grade graduation this week but I had my speech prepared.
Elementary school graduations are iffy things. Speakers often cancel at the last minute. You never know when Lindsay Lohan will be thrown back in rehab, Hillary Clinton will have a last-minute fundraiser, or David Ortiz will turn out to have a game that night. And as a well-known pundit who coins phrases like "iffy things," I always expect to be called.
No one called. My speech went undelivered. But here's what I would have told the Sixth-Grade Class of 2007.
"Sixth-Graders of America! Congratulations! You have mastered magnets! You are done with decimals! You can habla un poquito de espanol, and you know more about American history than most Americans have forgotten.
"You know how a bill becomes a law. You know that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. You can actually say what the Stamp Act was, and thanks to those weekly news fliers, you know far too much about AIDS, nuclear terrorism, and global warming. Raw data and raw fear make you ready for life, or as some people prefer to call it, "Seventh-Grade."
"But are you ready? Ready for the challenges, the tardy slips, and the gum under the desk that life throws at us? As I look out at your sleepy faces, I can't help but wonder. Did you learn all you could here?
"I'm told, for example, that few of you make a decent spit wad. A lost art, perhaps, but one that was required for my sixth-grade graduation. And I've heard that none of you can "Rock the Baby" with a yo-yo. What did they teach you in this school? Can it be, as I've heard, that no one gives wedgies anymore? That paper helicopters are history? That in all your years here, none of you ever got Cooties? Clearly there are grave problems with our educational system.
"But today is not a day for deficiencies. Today is a day of celebration. Seventh-grade awaits and you might be ready. Sort of. Call it, ohhhh, an iffy thing. But how can we know if you are ready? Here's how. Take out your pencils. This is a pop quiz.
"Jason graduated from sixth-grade thinking he was ready. Then he got to seventh-grade and was asked to factor a quadratic equation, dissect a frog, find the capital of Burkina Faso and ask a freckled girl out to a movie. How many days was it before Jason wished he was back in sixth-grade?
"Give up? So do I because like so many questions in life, this one has no answer, at least none you should care about. Like it or not, Jason was in seventh-grade and seventh-grade is not, in fact, an iffy thing. Oh no, seventh-grade is a huge, faceless institution that sucks up sixth-graders and in one short year turns them into (gasp!) eighth-graders. And from there, there's no looking back.
"You are the generation of the future. You are also the generation raised on Beanie Babies, Teletubbies, and Harry Potter. What does this say about the future? Frankly, I'd rather not think about that any more than I care to consider the real causes of the Civil War. Or the fate of paper helicopters. No, I prefer to focus on the present.
"Today, you will go home to a house filled with technology - TiVo, HDTV, iPods, and those cute little $200 doohickeys that go "craaackkk" when you drop them from a second story window onto concrete. How will you cope in a world of instant gratification, instant information, instant failure? That, Sixth-Graders of America, is the question. And, in closing, let me assure you that the answer is not, as in my day, "blowin' in the wind." The answer, as you all know, is on Youtube."
