I wish I had said this first!

Just ignore the cheesy background music!

The video is aimed at younger people, who need to figure out their relationship to the universe right away, before they begin to think about their relationship to society!  Living in a rural area as I do, I tend to forget a lot of what is happening to people in urban or suburban areas.  Honestly, it seems very much as though the typical working day is designed to prevent anyone from thinking clearly about anything.

It is amazing that there are so many liberals in urban areas at all; the daily grind should make Rush Limbaughs of all of us.  But somehow it doesn't.

In related news, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is losing popularity in certain sectors of the population; or more precisely, activist liberals have succeeded in getting advertisers to boycott Limbaugh to the point where the company that markets his talk show, Clear Channel Communications, is losing money.  I might not be stating the situation accurately; follow the link to get the Huffington Post report on it.

Those of us who try to avoid knowing anything about Rush Limbaugh have no idea of some of the more corrosive things he says.  One of my closest friends listens to Limbaugh Radio all the time; it is more than I can understand how we manage to be civil to each other!

To get back to graduation addresses, here's what I would have liked to say to our own graduates:

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be allowed to speak to you graduates and your families on graduation day, or Commencement, as it is sometimes called.  While you’re thinking: “I can hardly wait to get out of here; I’m so done with this place!” the rest of us are thinking: we are not done with you, not by a long shot.

An actual proposed campus somewhere

Once you have finished paying off your loans, guess what?  You get elected to the Board of Trustees of some school, most likely this one.  Then you get to have a say about what this campus will look like in twenty or thirty years.  This is a scary thought, considering what so many modern school campuses look like: total wastelands of  blocks of once gracious and charming homes razed to the ground, and replaced by generic-looking concrete buildings, or worse, acres and acres of parking lots, to satisfy the insatiable need for rich undergraduates to bring more and bigger personal transportation to school.  All the beautiful neighborhoods that give this place its unique character will gradually be replaced by bigger, less efficient buildings that, frankly, this school does not need.

We had four years to give you a certain amount of aesthetic sensibility, to provide you with some perspectives about public art and architecture and beauty, to moderate the total tastelessness of your fellow-Trustees.  Resist the trend towards generic shrubbery, and miles and miles of parkland!  Insist that the undergrads bring bikes to school, instead of bigger cars!  Hold back the trend to buying up neighborhood homes, and razing them to the ground, and replacing them with a lawn!  Prevent your alma mater from transforming itself to a sea of concrete roofs over nothing but endless hallways!  If, in these four years, we were unable to give you this perspective, we have failed, no matter how big a salary you earn.

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