The traditional commencement exercises that had been
scheduled for yesterday by my alma mater were cancelled a few days ago.
I’m not going to retrace the words and actions that
led to this decision. But I thought I would offer for students there and
elsewhere in this tumultuous year a replacement of sorts, a throwback to another commencement address, from Stephen
Colbert nearly two decades ago.
Extreme idealism—demands expected be fulfilled
immediately—is also blindness. But the deformed moral vision that Colbert
identified is more deadly in the long run, because it withers the soul day by
day.
If you want to know something close to my philosophy
on change, I can think of few lines better than these, from Bernard Malamud’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Fixer:
“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act
as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often
feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of
apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to
understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw
from the task if he has some small things to offer—he does so at the risk of
diminishing his humanity.”
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