You who are old, and
have fought the fight, and have won or lost or left the fight,
Weight us not down with fears of the world, as we run!
— Cale Young Rice
Part I.
When I wrote the above
demand into my quote notebook, I was young and annoyed by fearful
advice from my elders. I try not to be pessimistic around younger
people, which is easy because I’m optimistic by nature. In fact, the
one time I was invited to be a commencement speaker, years ago, at a
dental hygiene school, I may have shared the Rice quote, along with
congratulating the graduates on choosing a profession that would
make people smile more.
But now I notice that
at many colleges, speakers are disinvited by students who should
still be eager to learn, instead of just believing everything some
liberal professors taught them. The Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education notes that while there have always been protests, what
has changed is “the willingness of colleges and speakers to give in
... many apparently voluntary withdrawals are made at the college’s
urging.”
For this distorted kind
of “education,” some parents/students go tens of thousands into
debt? So, I am disregarding Mr. Rice and offering this commencement
speech to 2014 college graduates, from someone who is still fighting
the fight:
Hey, kids, listen up.
I’ve got some serious “fears of the world” for you to run with. Here
are three that scare me on behalf of my grandchildren.
1. Your economic
future. If you studied something for which graduates are in demand,
then maybe it was worth the level of debt some of you are carrying.
However, if, like me, you studied what interested you at the time,
with no thought about viable professions and, unlike me, borrowed to
do it (I quit when I ran out of cash), what were you THINKING? Add
to the need to repay your college loans the fact that you each owe
$55,000 toward the (so far) $17.5 trillion national debt, and may
someday have to pay tax increases to cover a) federal government
spending when no country can or will lend us more, and b) unfunded
liabilities at the state and local level. Unfairly, you’ll keep
paying into the Social Security/Medicare systems with little chance
of ever receiving your share of services.
2. Superbugs, etc. When
I was in college, many diseases had been almost eradicated in the
United States, including polio, pertussis and tuberculosis (TB), and
everywhere, smallpox was vanishing. Miracle antibiotics were
available to kill most bacteria. Now, because of more common world
travel and undocumented (not-vaccinated) immigration, some old
diseases are returning, and new ones like Bird Flu and Middle East
Respiratory Syndrome are arriving here. Thanks to the misuse of
antibiotics, we are seeing the growth of antibiotic-resistant germs,
bringing the possibility of a modern plague that our medical
profession can’t handle. Just going to the hospital adds risk of
infection to whatever initially causes the visit.
On the subject of
disease, let’s worry about the viruses attacking bees and bats,
which play a vital role in our ecosystem, including the part that
grows our food and battles insects. While worrying about food, worry
about genetically modified crops, then toss in my long-standing
general concern about population growth, as the world population
heads for eight billion by 2030. I know some conservatives see
little problem with this; it’s hard for me to see how it can NOT
soon become a problem. And it’s also hard for me to imagine that
there’s no environmental impact from all these people, many of them
wasteful. Even if there is climate change, and good luck, graduates,
sorting out THOSE conflicting arguments, when it happened seriously
in the past, it affected only a few humans who could migrate from
cold to warm, from drought to damp, away from rising seas, perhaps
without running into hostile “others.”
3. Here’s the big one
that has me seriously scared. Last month, I saw an old friend,
Warren Norquist, once a Westinghouse engineer, being interviewed on
local access TV. He’s become an expert on EMP — electromagnetic
pulse — which I’d heard of but it seemed a remote concern, like
climate change. (Yes, I saw this week’s headlines, “Antarctic ice
sheet rapidly collapsing,” but if you read the story you learn that
“rapidly” means “possibly within a couple of centuries.”)
But now we learn that
EMP is a more immediate threat, like the issue that scared my
youthful generation: nuclear war. My first year of college, we
watched news reports of the Cuban missile crisis, which, we’ve
learned recently as Russia released its once-secret documents, did
come close to nuking some of the East Coast.
The EMP occurs if a
terrorist enemy detonates a nuclear weapon above our atmosphere,
destroying all electric grids and microcircuitry in the United
States — in effect blasting us back to the 18th century. Planes
would fall immediately from the sky. Vehicles manufactured after
1970 couldn’t run — this includes those delivering our drugs and our
food. While people wouldn’t be affected as they were in Japan by
WWII nuclear radiation, I’ve seen an estimate that 90 percent of our
population would die the first year, either from lack of essential
supplies or by raids from desperate people on what we do have.
Didn’t mean to scare
you too much, graduates. Fear No. 3, with help from Fear No. 2,
would basically wipe out any need to fear much else: American
civilization would essentially end, and the rest of the world would
have to deal with terrorists and disease without us.
More optimistically,
all of the above can be addressed, though not easily: If you want to
come back here next week, I’ll share some ideas.
