Graduation Speeches that Matter

Glenn Yu is a senior at South Kingstown High School. The following is a copy of his speech that he would like to read during his graduation ceremony. Unfortunately, it is unclear as to whether Glenn will be able to read this speech because it is not filled with the usual bromides and vapid platitudes.

There was once a tribe that lived in peace and harmony for thousands of years. Every day, hunters would go out and when they returned, the bounties from the hunt were shared by all members of the tribe. No one went hungry, not even the sick, the weak, or the elderly. But one day, the most skilled hunter said “I’m the best hunter. Why should I share the bounty of my hunt?” And from that day forward, he stored his meat in a mountain cave. Eventually, other skilled hunters saw this and they said “Why shouldn’t I be able to keep more too?” And so they too kept their meat in mountain caves. Then something happened in the tribe that had never happened before. Some people, especially the old, the weak, and the sick began to go hungry while others were well fed. Soon, it became their culture. No one thought it unusual that some were starving while others had more than they needed and the tribal elders even began to teach their young to emulate the hoarding habits of these few.

 

I heard this allegory recently from a documentary named “I Am” which I suggest you watch… All I know that many of you in this crowd see this process as the nature of life, you see greed as natural. But does a tree take more nutrients than it needs? No, it takes what it needs to grow. Does a lion kill every single gazelle it sees? No, it kills until it’s full. Our species, and our species alone, has created a culture that is completely insatiable, completely unsustainable, a culture which values taking more than what is needed, a culture predicated on the belief that we can only be significant at someone else’s expense. But that isn’t natural. Greed isn’t natural. Perverse competition isn’t natural. Even Darwin, who is credited with coining the phrase “Survival of the Fittest,” said “sympathy is our strongest instinct.” He said this because humans aren’t necessarily strong. We don’t have big fangs, we don’t have claws, we don’t have poison. But what we do have is the adaptation to cooperate and take care of each other. What we do have is love. In Darwin’s Descent of Man, he wrote only twice of “survival of the fittest” but 95 times about love.” Love is in our DNA. 

 

But regardless of our DNA, we’ve lost our sense of community and we’ve replaced it with materialism. Never has a society been so advanced. And never has a society been so lonely, so depressed, so disconnected. We perceive ourselves as sane. But we’d have to be insane to believe that. We have a political system where the candidate with the most money from the most corporations almost always wins. We condemn slavery while forcing 12 year olds in Cambodia to work 18 hour days in sweatshops. We know that the environment is in peril, and yet we still subsidize oil and emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases each year. We are infatuated with the idea of freedom and yet our country is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners. We allow tax breaks and capital gains to the top .1% while forcing millions of people to sleep in their own excrement. We condemn ISIL’s jihad propaganda while we produce films like “American Sniper” that glorify our own war crimes. We live in a society where we spend more money on the military than education, where more taxpayer money goes to killing than saving. We send our children to fight wars that profit the rich; we send our children to take standardized tests that profit the corporations. Tell me that’s sane.

 

It’s unacceptable for us to remain apathetic and uninvolved in the politics of our school, community and nation. None of us are neutral. We all cast our vote each day by what we do and what we don’t do. With our apathy, we vote for hunger, human rights violations, slavery, war, and the devastation of our environment. Every word we utter to another human being has an effect. How we greet each other. What we say. And more importantly, what we don’t say. It all matters. So I urge you, the Class of 2015, to stand up. We are the future of this nation and we alone will ultimately decide how we are remembered in history. So don’t accept the world as it is, don’t accept injustice. Do something about it. Fight. Fight because there won’t be anything to fight for if you don’t. There’s an old saying: there is only one way to eat an elephant. One piece at a time. You can’t end world hunger. But you can help a homeless guy on the street. You can learn and spread knowledge just as I am doing now. And so I will end with this. Martin Luther King was just one person. Nelson Mandela was just one person. But they fought for what they believed in. They struggled against immeasurable odds. So while I know that you guys will probably forget most of the things that I say in this speech, I want you to remember that you too are just one person. And that isn’t limiting in any way. You too are capable of ending this violence, ending this slavery, ending this hatred, ending this injustice. After all, love is in our DNA.