Commencement Address 2010: It's all good!

Okay so I have taught the Crown Core course 27 times in 27 years, courses on AIDS, on Columbus, on Gallileo and Newton, on Jane Goodall and the chimps, on Darwin and on native americans, so the last few years on genetics and cloning and genetically modified chickens … Did you read Oryx and Crake or Frankenstein? … on robots and trans-humanism, I consider it part of my continuing education. And the class was about ethics too. As the students would say "It’s all good!" of course they say it when they really mean "No worries!" which actually means "You are so not Fresh; and I haven’t got time to make the deeply disturbed nature of your misunderstanding clear to you. So it's all good."

In our core class I guess we learned the laws for robots and some fundamentals of genetic counseling, all of which will come in handy for you, I promise. I have the core reader right here somewhere and I do plan on reading it again someday.

But I also taught writing. And in writing we try to get people to have purposes in their speeches and essays purposes that are connected with the purposes in their lives, so I need to get to the thesis as soon as possible.

As I recall I gave a brief speech in your core course while you were pretending to listen in which I said that UC was a public research institution and that the larger purpose, beyond getting you a job, was to serve the people of the state of California by educating you to invent new knowledge and new things and to be a resource for the community. I told you that the people who worked in the dining hall and did the other jobs to make you safe and healthy were also paying something for your education. They deserved your pledge: that you would take the responsibility to be a resource for our state and community. They deserve also that you will help to sustain this university by voting for education and supporting your university.

So the thesis is that we need to invent knowledge and use knowledge to be happy and to make a respectful and successful and happy community. Now you just have to figure out what makes you and your community happy.

I was also the Mayor and I discovered two things about that: (1) the best thing about it was giving your business card to fourth graders and (2), when you are mayor you have to give a lot of speeches for all kinds of events and in those speeches you have to thank people. Be grateful and show it. So let’s say thanks right now. In fact, I want the students to say thanks right now to staff, faculty and their parents; you can wave to them. I will say thanks to you for giving me the greatest job a person can have.

I‘m supposed to give you the advice which I never gave myself, like don’t Text While  Driving and be sure to floss and wear long sleeves to your job interviews. I have nothing against tattoos; my father had them and my son. In fact most everyone I know and love has them. But I don’t know how people choose which to get ... and it’s because I am not fresh. I’m not even cool about my slang terms.

I don’t get it and that is integral to what I have to say to you. You do get it. You will get work. You will find happiness in your personal lives. You will be successful. I know you’re saying how can you say that? Well why would I say anything else? I know that you will have plenty of jobs that do not seem to fit your skills. I have had every job imaginable from sales to janitoring to hospitaling. My father told me that every job had dignity and that every skill was an art and could be done in a way that was artful from digging a hole to washing dishes. Of course I had an advantage that most of you do not. I had a child when I was your age. So work seemed like a pretty useful thing. My advice about work is simple: You’re smart enough; now be pleasant and respectful and build that community and you will never be sorry about any job; any moral job can be done with dignity. I didn’t get this job until I was almost thirty years old. So make many copies of your resume and let them say no. Eventually they will say yes. I have seen a statistic that the unemployment rate for people 22-24 is thirty percent down in the last two years. Thanks Obama. Why? well you're smart and you're cheap. But it will take time to invent and shape your job. So don’t get panicky.

But I was going to say something about tattoos or what we call body art. First as I said I don’t really get it. I saw a young woman student last month with a tattoo on her leg that said I Heart Weekends. So this is a generational thing. I mean I get putting your mother's name on your skin or even your favorite symbol like a skull with fire in its eyes or some very nice Japanese Koi but I heart weekends was more than I could process And it is exactly why this woman will be a success in life.

It is a post modern dilemma so let me tell you a post modern joke: It’s from the Marx Brothers and may be apocryphal which only makes it more valid as a source for postmodern thought.

Chico says, There’s a million dollars buried in the basement of the house next door.
And Groucho looks out the window and says, But there is no house next door.
So Chico says, Well then we better build one.

I only have 8 minutes so I can’t explain it to you but to quote the movie “The Song of Bernadette” for the believer no explanation is necessary, for the unbeliever no explanation is possible. Like I said I don’t get it. I can only make it into a modernist realistic parable. It seems to say that if we build schools, then they will be full of geniuses or if we build prisons, they will be full of somebody that we call criminal. So build schools.

In reality the world is full of nonsense and requires the kind of creative and at times magical thinking that builds houses with basements expecting a fortune and it might pull us out of this morass and only you can do it. Because you get the joke and you know why that woman tattooed I heart weekends on her leg. You might think you don't get it, but that’s only the red bull talking. You get it. You are fresh.

So we have to love the irrational if we are going to live in irrational times. What’s irrational? Well we love oil and it is killing us; we love speculation on wall street and it's killing us. We want to stop drug dealers and so we are busting people’s grandmothers and children without papers in Arizona and here. We love family but we do not extend that to gay people. We just invented eBooks that pretend they are turning the pages and everybody is really happy about this. I mean that's irrational.

What else is irrational? A writer in Germany who was persecuted by the Nazis was asked why he did it and he said when events are at their cruelest and most brutal, then it is even more important “to penetrate the world with love.” Yesterday was Anne Frank's birthday and she said that in spite of everything she still thought people were good. My own father who was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo forgave his enemies and was himself an enemy of war all his life. It is not always the rational thing that makes change. In fact, loving your enemy is a miracle of irrationality.

Of course we have a model at Crown, Terry Freitas, the student whose name is on our community service award. He was a friend of mine. If I could rename the college for him, I would . He visited with me every few weeks for a few years, and we would talk about the college or the world. It was a blessing to have that opportunity. He was murdered in the jungle of Colombia. But he would have called it a cloud forest or a rain forest. He was an advocate for the indigenous people who were being exploited by oil producers and he was murdered by revolutionary group called the FARC. And he was once a Resident Assistant here at Crown, who worked to make the Core Course more relevant for you.

There’s a quote from Terry in one of websites devoted to him and to his companions where he says “We are doing this work so that people can listen to singing.” I would carve that into the crossbeam over the college office.

I have to add that he did not go into this forest as an avatar. More’s the pity. He went in the flesh. I am not sure what you will be asked to do: go to war as a drone warrior or to live in the world as sims or enhanced creature or to stuff golf balls in oil wells with a remote operated Vehicle. But we all have our jungles or cloud forests: maybe in medicine or engineering new things for people or the corporate jungle or the oceans, even a neighborhood can be a jungle and all of these places have to be penetrated with love and we have to work so that people can hear the singing.

I had my moments in various jungles some of them quite dark, but I want to tell you about one of them. The earthquake in 1989. Maybe you were a year old. The town fell down and like those people in the gulf, I hated the government. I could either get pretty angry and cynical or try to change it, So I became a commissioner and then I was invited to run for council and I became a councilmember in 1998 and the Mayor in 2000-01. Even a small coastal city can be a dangerous jungle or a miraculous cloud forest. It is a human endeavor and we need to go about this work in the same spirit I spoke of: we need to penetrate these jungles with love and we have to work so that people can listen to singing.

I want to remind you that I was invited to run for office. Someone said you should do this. And that was the moment when I thought that I could do this. It is important to invite people, to ask them to do something, and to tell them that you believe that they can do it. In a dark time we get cynical and we become certain of defeat but that is the time when we should be penetrating the world with love and that means we should be inviting people to take action and to live creatively. We should be inviting the children out there to come to the university, We need to tell them we want you to be here. We invite you to be a dedicated scientist and to go to med school and to start a business and to create your family. To save the planet and to bring justice to someone even if it is in the smallest circumstance: Justice needs to be everywhere and the health of the planet is everywhere.

We don't forget you when you leave. You can write to me at timfitz@ucsc.edu or look at the blog: timfitz.blogspot .com. I will put my notes for this speech on the site. This year two students from twenty or so years ago wrote to me and said that I probably did not remember them. That was not true. I don't always get the names right, but a little coaching and it comes back. Even if you were not in my class or in core at all I would like to hear from you. Something about making the world into a caring and respectful place. Remember there is no job that lacks dignity if it is a moral job.

But that is twenty years from now. Right now, go build that house, the one with the million dollars in basement.