Emmanuel College Page 1 of 4 Emmanuel College NEWS & EVENTS Home> About Emmanuel> News & Events > News> News Detail 2009 EMMANUEL COLLEGE COMM ENCEMENT SPEECH June 16, 2009 Dennis Lehane, bestselling author of novels including Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River, Shutter Island; and The Given Day delivered the Commencement Address at Emmanuel College's 87th Commencement ceremony on May 9, 2009. Dennis Lehane: Author Dennis Lehane Good morning. When staff at Emmanuel called my assistant, Christine, recently and asked if they could get a copy of my commencement speech, she laughed so hard she almost choked on an Altoid because the idea of me having anything prepared before the absolute nth hour of a deadline is fairly comical to anyone who knows me. I am a writer, in point of fact, because preparation is not my strong suit-making a bunch of stuff up is. I became a writer for a couple of lofty reasons, yes, but mostly because I'm no good at anything else and I look terrible in a tie. Just awful. I became a writer because I don't particularly like to shave until about the fourth day and I'm a big fan of working in a bathrobe. Oh, and I also don't do mornings. And yet I'm here. Why am I here? Well the most honest answer is because my wife, Angie, is an alum and when I told her I'd been asked to do this, she said, "Oh, please, oh, please," and you know, "Happy wife, happy life," and all that. So here was my wife all excited to return to her college and see her hubby give the commencement and maybe get a little VIP treatment from her alma mater. Oh , she's not here by the way-she got pregnant and can't fly on doctor's orders. While I'm standing up here before you, she's back in Tampa having her baby shower. That's irony. That's funny. Remember that irony, because I'm going to come back to it. I've been asked what I could possibly say to you grads as you face a world with a terrible job market, a world still trying to sprout from beneath the ashes of the subprime mortgage crisis, a world in which bedrock American corporation after bedrock American corporation is going in the tank, and a world in which we are forced to know who Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are. It's ugly out there, no question. Hideous. Heinous, as we may have said when I was your age. When I left college, the housing market had jusLcoliapsed, actually, after a five year boom. We had a little itty-bitty banking and junk bond crisis that pillaged our economy to the tune of 160 billion dollars, mostly due to a lack of proper federal government regulation . And a whole bunch of people in the Middle East didn't seem to like us much. Thank God, in twenty years, we've learned from that. I can't stand up here and, just because I'm twenty years older than you , tell you those twenty years equate to wisdom. They don't. The world would very much want you to believe that you should take a career-track job (if you're lucky enough to find one) and laser-lock your focus on climbing the ladder in said job-first, so you can begin paying off your student loans; second, so you can begin amassing more debt via credit cards buying stuff for your first apartment; third , so you can sign up to the American Dream via a mortgage on a "starter" home with which you will build equity toward a "real" home which will increase, drastically, your debt and therefore chain you to that career track of that job for that corporation at exactly the point when you'll be beginning to question if that's all you want out of life. http://www.emmanuel.eduiAbout_EmmanuellNews_and _ EventslNewsINews_Articles/Le... 611 8/201 3 Emmanuel College Page 2 of 4 If that is what you want out of life, by all means, please grab it. If it's what you want, then nothing could be finer. Truly. The happiest people I know are people who know what they want. I know happy plumbers because they do, in point of fact, love plumbing . I know happy accountants, happy stock brokers (okay, not many right now, but I knew a few) , and happy lawyers. I am not, believe me, standing up here spouting some Corporate America is Bad BS . I'm not. But Corporate America is bad , if that's not where you wish to be . We've been sold a bill of goods that certain professions-those in medicine, law, finance , and venture capital-are to be exalted . They are not. They are not to be condemned , but neither are they to be placed on an altar for worship. They're just professions, and none have been designated by God to be any better than another. The world wants good worker bees, because worker bees make the hive run and they don't ask questions, and they are usually polite enough to die once thei r work is done. Don't be just a worker bee. Think. That's all I ask of you . Think for yourself. Ask yourself something-what kind of world do you want? Not what kind of world are you told you should want. Not what kind of world did your parents want. Or their parents. With all due respect, we don't know anything . If we did, we wouldn't be handing you the world we're handing you now. If it were up to me , I would live in a world of tactile media­ newspapers, books not Kindles, CDs you actually load into a tray. You would go to movies only in movie theaters and it wou ld be a communal experience. There would be no cell phones, no headphones to block out chance human interaction , no Twitter or Facebook. I'm a Luddite essentially, and I could wax rhapsodic for hours about the years I lived Way Back When where, if you weren't home when someone called , they couldn't get a hold of you . When a weekend meant everyone stopped working. When privacy wasn't considered a social crime. And you know what you should say to me? "So what?" So what. My whining about the good old days is suspect because I'm bound to sentimentalize my youth the farther I get from it. Were things simpler when I was 22? Maybe. But who said simpler is better? When did that become a concept worthy of being held up beside, "The unexamined life is not worth living" and Einstein's Theory of Relativity? Simpler is not better. Simpler is just simpler. And often times, it's highly suspect. It's certainly easier, but when people glorify terms like "simple" and "fundamental," I think of kindergarten. Things were fundamental when I was four-the square peg did not go into the round hole but it went into the square one . Cheers-lesson learned. Two plus two did, in fact, equal four. Cool. Good to know. But as I grew, the world got more complex. Math , for example-I'm a whiz at adding , multiplying , dividing and subtracting things. A human calculator. But then , in high school, they th rew the X at me . And then the Y. Where the hell did they come from? I sti ll don't get it. In high school, I had a teacher work with me after school every week so I could pass-barely, believe me-Algebra I and Algebra II. Now, was Higher Mathematics wrong because I didn't understand it? Should I complain about simpler times and exalt the superiority of long division over the Pythagorean theorem? If I'm a moron, sure. If I embrace stupidity and believe in the developmental stagnation of the human race, absolutely. It's not me that's wrong , it's the math . There are a lot of people in this world who, metaphorically-speaking , want you to buy into hating math because they're too stupid to understand it. Don't buy in . Please. If the darkness of the last eight years in this country have taught us anything it should be th is-n othing is simple. As much as we'd prefer it be , it is just not so. So if, in the name of simply providing us safety, they threaten our civil rights and want to run roughshod over the Constitution, wiretap us and proudly stand for torture, please remind them that thousands upon thousands of brave men bled to death on fields of battle for freedom from such things. Those are not abstract things and we cannot have them treated as such. America is not defined by armchair warriors and tough talking Monday morning quarterbacks who think shouting the loudest is the same as playing the game. It is defined by us. It is defined by you . I think therefore I am . You think, therefore you are. And never forgot what happened those times we decided it hurt too much to th ink, and so we handed the car keys over to others and said , "You can drive us off the cliff as long as you take the scenic route ." I feel so much hope now because no one is saying "mission accomplished" when it is most definitely not accomplished.