Ensign Braden Nelligan and President Donald Trump
One year ago I attended the Faber College
commencement for Nellie Junior, at which the speaker informed the crowd that
“If you were born a straight white male, well, congratulations, you hit the
jackpot.” At the time, I immediately thought of my old man, who at age 15, was
hauling ore in a Union Carbide vanadium mine underneath the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“Gosh, Dad,” I mused, “You never knew how good you had it.”
However, the thoughtful female Nigerian
poet hadn’t even hit stride: “If you are a white woman, you are privileged
because you are white.” C’mon
sister! Perhaps at a celebratory event at
an elite school, it verges on psychotic to denigrate 60 percent of your
audience – you know, those privileged sad sacks who keep the school financially
secure so that the oppressed can attend. Nah.
The remaining 40 percent seem to nod vigorously while the colorful Third World shawls and scarves worn over
traditional black gowns flutter in the carnival atmosphere. Now I know full
well this
“courageous” woman is entitled to freely her speak her opinions – after all,
this is America. Not Nigeria.
With that fatuous, comic nightmare a year old and the serious kids like mine and his pals heading off to old-fashioned work and paychecks, this year I attended another commencement, for Little Nellie, at Navy-Marine Corps Stadium in Annapolis.
Coincidentally, like my old man, the
speaker’s Dad had started as another one of those jackpot-winning laborers;
unlike Nellie Sr., he ascended to astronomical success.
President Trump spoke to the United
States Naval Academy Class of 2018 and it was all that could be hoped for – that is,
by the Midshipman and parents of Midshipmen who had seen their kids endure four
years of military discipline, barracks life, tough physical tests, three summers
away at sea, and mandatory softball courses like Electrical Engineering,
Calculus, Thermodynamics, and Chemistry.
Seventy five percent of my middle son’s class (including him) are STEM
majors. No B.A.s in Dance or Latino Studies or Gender & Sexuality. Or
Poetry, alas.
Nevertheless, the intellects and ambitions
do intersect. While it seems an increasing number of Faber kids opt for
exploring their “creativity,” asking what this artistically starved nation can
do for them, many of the Faber kids go on to use their privilege in finance and
law and medicine to add value and economic vitality to the national engine. How
do I know this? The Faber Board helps
manage a whopping $2.3 billion endowment, which I guarantee you is run by those
“jackpot guys” whose sweat and skills allow the social justice warrior grads to
stand on shores pleading for the oceans to recede all the while giving voices
to the voiceless.
The Annapolis grads enter into a different
realm. They are all almost immediately responsible for the welfare and lives of
thousands of sailors and Marines and untold millions of dollars of equipment,
some of it lethal. No time for performance art, comrade, when you’re sitting
atop ordnance that can reduce a thousand voiceless bad guys and their shrines to
ashes in a righteous instant.
What’s so compelling is that given these
two institutions represent the extremes, their commencements represent the
tenor of the times. At Faber, for an immigrant, no less from a flailing state (goodness,
you cannot make this stuff up), it’s all about the introspection, the
self-absorption - this desperately flawed nation the graduates are forced into; the
recitation of a laundry list of all the tired and reflexive tropes – social
validation, gender injustice, those without voices, evil privilege, and oh
yeah, “calling your elected officials” – it’s the faculty lounge in full grievance
mode. A majority of the crowd endures the “dialogue” with the stoic
condescension it deserves.
At the Naval Academy, the language is swaggering
bravado for certain, but it’s also resolute, confident, uplifting; it recalls
heritage and sacrifice and heroism and a genuine acknowledgement of what the
Midshipman have accomplished and a reminder of the responsibilities they will
soon confront all over the globe.
Our Faber speaker, in an incredible
turnaround almost completely indicting her past ramblings, closes with a quote not
from Maya Angelou or Gabriela Mistral, but from a 19th Century paragon
of white female privilege, Emily Dickinson: “`Hope is a thing with feathers.’ It makes me imagine hope as something both breakable and forceful.” C'mon sister! The
eye-rolling is palpable as this tepid charge to the graduates echoes around the
now half-full venue.
In Annapolis, it’s pure sound and fury: “You’re among the finest people anywhere in
the world, the smartest, the strongest. You know you will make us proud. You
are warriors. You are fighters. You are champions!”
And instead of feathers, all we get is the
force of the Blue Angels blasting over the crowd at 300 mph, with yes, the woke sound of freedom.