Red Jacket Central Commencement Speech
Red Jacket Central Commencement Speech
Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen
Shortsville, New York
Saturday, 26 June 2004
Red Jacket graduates, Mr. Benjamin, members of the faculty and school board, and the parents and friends and loved ones of today's graduates, welcome to the 2004 Commencement ceremonies of Red Jacket Central. We are here to share a very special day in the life of each of today's graduates.
If you'll grant me a moment of personal privilege, I want to recognize that my mother, Norma Bredesen, who many of you know, is here today. And my brother Dean, and my uncle Pete Walborn of Clifton, and a number of nieces and nephews, nearly all of whom graduated from Red Jacket.
Mr. Benjamin, I first want to thank you for the honor of being this year's commencement speaker. I was a student at Red Jacket from third grade through graduation, and as the years go by, I realize more and more just how much of me, of my attitudes, of my basic principles come from the world of my school, its teachers and principal, and my fellow students. I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up in Shortsville, to have attended Red Jacket, and to have had the chance to build in life on some very solid foundations.
Let me be more direct: I love Shortsville, I love Red Jacket, and I love being back home with you all here today.
Graduates, let me start today by offering my simple congratulations to each of you in today's graduating class. You've accomplished something these past years that is significant, and today marks a milestone in your lives, and in the lives of your parents as well. Andrea's and my son Benjamin graduated from high school in 1998, and from college in 2002, and I can understand firsthand the enormous pride and emotion that the parents here today must feel.
Graduates, today also weaves together your own destiny, and that of Red Jacket, for the rest of your lives.
When you get married, the papers will say "So and so and John Smith were married yesterday at such and such. Mr. Smith, a 2004 graduate of Red Jacket Central "
When you get a promotion, the announcement will be, "Kodak Corporation announced today that Frank Smith has been named the corporation's new chief financial officer. Mr. Smith is a graduate of such and such college, and was a 2004 graduate of Red Jacket Central in Shortsville, New York.
If you get elected President of the United States, every little newspaper in the world will have something like, "Mary Jones, 55, was elected President of the United States yesterday by an overwhelming margin. Ms. Jones, formerly the Governor of the American State of New York, was a 2004 graduate of Red Jacket Central "
And of course, in your obituary, it will be right up there, just after the list of who you left behind.
Graduates, you, and Red Jacket, and our nation's public school system as of this afternoon are in a lifelong partnership. Just as Red Jacket has nurtured and supported you these past few years, you now undertake an obligation to nurture and support it. If in your lives you remain in this area, help Red Jacket in every way you can. Speak well of it, lend a hand in the PTA or tutoring or sports, run for the school board; find some way to contribute.
If your life and career finds you elsewhere, as mine did, repay what Red Jacket has done for you with that same contribution back to the public schools in your new home. Our public school system in America is a wonderful thing, but it is under tremendous pressure, its teachers are challenged, and it needs your help wherever you find yourself in the years ahead.
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Today is a milestone in your lives. There will be other milestones: marriage, the birth of children, those birthdays that end with a zero.
But graduation is a special milestone, a forward looking milestone. Not one of those when you reflect on what has been, but a time for looking ahead, for plotting your own unique passage in this world. My own graduation from Red Jacket was in 1961, which I know seems like an unimaginably long time ago to most of you here - before your parents were born in many cases - but I can still remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.
Over the years I have given a lot of graduation speeches; both at high schools and on college campuses. I was the speaker just recently at the University of Memphis commencement, with 1500 graduates and probably 10,000 in the audience. I have a confession to make: I have been more anxious about this one here today, more concerned to be sure to say the right thing, than any of the others.
There is something about coming back home, and standing up in front of Miss Arnold and Mr. Schaertl and Mr. Fabris and other teachers and some of my old classmates. You're not the Governor of Tennessee any more, you're just an older version of that teenage kid who Mr. Fabris threw the eraser at for falling asleep in his class, who was banned from the school library for the rest of the year until his mother intervened, and who never could summon up the courage to ask for a date the girl he really wanted to.
At the other graduations, you can puff yourself up a little, you can hide behind your Governor title, you can act like you're pretty smart. But back here at Red Jacket, they know you.
So I decided that what I wanted to say and to elaborate on was this: it took me ten years from the time I left here for college to realize just how good growing up in Shortsville and going to school at Red Jacket really was.
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One of the seminal events of my life was in my late 20's, when the young lady I was dating-and with whom I will celebrate 30 years of marriage this fall-gave me a gift. It was a piece of driftwood she had found and she had carved a saying for me in it.
"Life is discovering yourself."
This was continuing a debate we'd had before. I believed the opposite, that life is inventing yourself, that you keep acquiring new skills and changing exactly who you are until you get it right. Her belief was just the opposite, that life is about reaching inside yourself and finding out who you really are, and then being that person.
With the perspective of a good part of a life behind, I can tell you that she was absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong.
When things really started to work for me was when I stopped trying to be someone new and reached inside to try and discover who I really was, what I really valued, what I really loved. And when you do that, you come right back around to your mother, to the home you grew up in, to the town you lived in, and very importantly, to the school you went to, and that was Red Jacket.
When I had left Shortsville, I went to a fancy school-Harvard; I lived in a very big and sophisticated city-Boston; I had friends who had had experiences that I only imagined. I was a small town boy trying to be something different, and I found myself 27 years old and not very successful at doing that and not very happy at doing that.
What Andrea made me do was come to grips with who I was, to come to the understanding that I was Shortsville and Red Jacket and fishing in the outlet and not Harvard and Boston and summering in Europe. That was the foundation that God had given me to build on, that was the foundation I was going to build on, and in retrospect it has proven a much more durable and much more productive foundation than the one I was trying to invent for myself.
When I started to come to grips with who I was, there were some things that I realized I especially valued about Red Jacket and Shortsville.
First of all, Shortsville and Red Jacket were a truly democratic place where people of all walks of life and interests lived together in a way that doesn't happen in a lot of America. In 1950s Shortsville and Manchester the president of a local company and the biggest farmer sat at the lunch counter with a regular laborer and the town drunk. I hope very much they still do.
And I've seen so many high schools over the years-usually the really big ones-where the students are all broken into factions that don't even know each other. Red Jacket was not like that. When I was in high school, I didn't play sports, I tended to haunt the library and loved to go do things in Miss Arnold's chemistry lab or Mr. Schaertl's physics bench after school. My classmate Ron Miller was the quarterback of the football team and probably the most popular guy in my class. In a lot of other schools our two worlds would never intersect, but Ron and I were good friends all through high school, and I honestly believe we were both enriched by the friendship.
The Shortsville and Manchester and Red Jacket that I remember were a great mixing pot. I believe that we all need the stability and grounding that comes from knowing lots of people who see the world differently from you, whose experiences are different from yours. There'd be fewer crazy right-wingers if each of them knew some family who was beaten down by events with nowhere to turn; there'd be fewer crazy left-wingers if each of them knew someone who had found the strength and self-reliance inside to overcome some adversity. We need that anchoring the we get from others with different lives.
There's an old African proverb that I love: "Walking alone, I have seen many wonderful things, none of which were true."
Once I came to believe Andrea's advice-"Life is discovering yourself"-I reached down inside and found how much I valued a world in which the people who were my friends had different views and were going about their lives in different ways. It's the foundation of my interest in politics. Red Jacket and schools like it have something special in this, and I hope you never lose it.
So one thing that I discovered from my Red Jacket experience was that I really valued a life with a richness of friends and acquaintances who saw the world from a different prospective than I did. Another was just the simple value of hard work.
Mr. Harkenrider was the principal of Red Jacket all the time I was there, and what I remember most about him was that he was probably the most demanding person that I have ever been around. He had no use for slacking off, no use for doing less than you were capable of, no use for excuses, and he hired teachers and ran the school so that everyone else had little use for these things as well. I especially remember Miss Arnold in that regard. A very good lesson, and a principle that I hope Mr. Benjamin is continuing to this day.
By the time that Andrea had given me my driftwood with the hand-carved thought, I had gotten comfortable in a world of go to work at 8 and come home at 5. Reaching back-finding those roots-remembering Mr. Harkenrider and Miss Arnold and Mr. Fabris and Mr. Schaertl and their insistence on hard work and excellence really snapped me out of that. You earn your paycheck 8 to 5; you earn your advancement outside of that.
I was asked by a reporter a while ago what technological advance had most helped my career. She was thinking I would say the computer, or the internet. My answer, a completely honest one, was "If you want to get ahead, the alarm clock is the best friend you can have."
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I want to talk with you a bit about success. You invited me back here for this commencement because I was a "successful" graduate; Governor of Tennessee.
A lot of people measure success in some very conventional ways; how much money you have, how well-known you are, whether you play for a major league team or are on television, what office you got elected to. I know you won't remember much of what's been said here today, but I would like you to take away the idea that there is a better measure of success: and that measure is whether as you pass through life you put more back in than you take out.
The world is divided into two kinds of people; those who as they pass through manage to put more back in than they take, and those who only take. We all know people in both those categories.
Everyone borrows a little, takes a little. When we're growing up, we borrow from our parents, we borrow things and time and love that we don't always pay back right on the spot. As students, we're supported on foundations laid by a lot of people who cared about the future. As adults, there are times when we lean on our friends. When the tornado crushes your home or a tragedy strikes someone dear, or you are just overwhelmed, it's OK to say "please help me".
The question is, do we pay back what we borrow, with interest? Do we pay back our parents by giving the same time and love to our own children that we received, plus a little.? Do we pay back our friends and loved ones by being there even quicker when they need us?
This idea of putting more back in the world than you take out-of making things better because you passed by-isn't the conventional idea of success, but it's a better one.
I have an acquaintance from college who is very successful: he was president of a big company, famous, lots of honors, rich. He retired a few years ago and now spends his time with other rich people at his various homes around the world. But I know him, and I can tell you that he got there by taking a little more from everything he touched than he put back in. He paid himself very well indeed. He did the minimum for his employees that he could get away with. He would fire a twenty-year employee without a thought if they could get along without her. There was a vacuum around him; he sucked everything to himself.
And I have an uncle, now passed away, who many of you knew-Arch Walborn. Arch was a friend to everyone, did small favors beyond counting for people just to be helpful, made people feel good, raised a fine family and stuck by his wife through years of illness-he actually believed that part of the vows where it says "in sickness and in health".
Arch was never on the cover of Forbes. He was the maintenance man at the Papec. But there is no doubt in my mind as to which of these two was the more successful, about who invested in the world, who made things he touched better for his having been there, and who only took away.
There are a lot of ways of contributing and making things better, but I want to ask you to especially consider at some point in your life some form of public service. It might be running for the school board or the state legislature, or serving on the local zoning board. And it isn't limited to public office. It may also be about serving in the military to protect our country from threats abroad, or volunteering to clean up a neighborhood, or helping those who need a hand.
The thought I want to leave you with is that real success lies in being able to wake up on your 80th birthday, and honestly say as you look back over your life that the world is a little better off because you were here. Put more back in than you take out.
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I'll end where I started, with today as a milestone.
These mileposts, these markers along the road have a way of making us pause a moment. We look over our shoulder backward along the road we've just traveled, we peer down the road ahead, at least until it bends from our view, we reflect on where we've been and where we're going.
It's the moments we do this that make us uniquely human. Other animals grow, and procreate, and rear families, and gather food, and save things up, and fight, and I imagine experience joy and pain and contentment. But they don't wonder, and they don't stand outside themselves and seek meaning in how their days are spent. That's uniquely human.
We have been given a gift we cannot begin to comprehend-a soul, the capacity to seek meaning in our lives, a spark of consciousness in a universe so beautiful.
Use the gift.
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I'm deeply honored to be back home here today: to celebrate with you this fine occasion, to offer a few thoughts at this milestone in your own lives, and most of all to wish each and every one of you Godspeed in the years to come.
Thank you.