Under the baobab: Justice, mercy and walking humbly: Revisiting advice to graduates
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Our family is off to support the Nittany Lions in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium. Go Blue.
Below are excerpts from my 2012 Phi Beta Kappa graduation speech.
“... I wasn’t a Phi Beta Kappa when I graduated back in 1975. You had to be summa cum laude, which at the time required a 3.90. I had a 3.87. ... Since I am clearly not the smartest guy in the room, I was curious why I was asked to speak with you on this auspicious day ...
“I teach in Africa, where people go through great effort to invite the old people of the village to attend and witness important ceremonies: weddings, births, inaugurations, graduations. Once the important business is taken care of, the oldest of the old, an elder is asked to say a few words, blessing and honoring the ritual. It is assumed that the elder is the one most likely to be the most proximate to joining the ancestors and may have unique wisdom to add to the ceremony. It is also true that being the oldest means that he or she probably has the least energy and will not overly prolong the event ...
“I have five points of advice ... the first three things are distilled from one of the minor prophets from the older testament, Micah: 1) do justice, 2) love mercy, 3) walk humbly with your God ...
“Justice requires equality. It is the opposite of elitism (authoritarianism). It flows in the opposite direction from competition. To do justice requires that you ask the question, ‘how may I help my neighbors,’ not how may I defeat them. Without justice there is no peace. Those who treat others unjustly will have their hearts in a constant state of turmoil and unrest. ... Seek justice and then do justice.
“Beyond the issue of fairness there is mercy. If we all got only what we deserved, we would have very little indeed. We couldn’t have made it through childhood without the love and mercy of our parents. None of us could have survived the selfishness of the terrible twos, the fearsome fours, and the teenaged self-focused angst unless those who loved us showed us mercy. We have what we have because others have shown us love. We are who we are because they have shown us mercy. The source of mercy is compassion and the understanding that we share this planet. No one owns it.
“The last of these is perhaps the toughest — walking humbly with your God. It doesn’t matter if you call your God Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, Krishna, or the ‘greatest consciousness of the universe.’ Find her and walk humbly with her. The fabricated myth of self-made success, ‘lifting yourself up by your bootstraps,’ is a fallacy. None of us got to where we are by just our own efforts. We live on God’s made earth, in a human fabricated society. You are graduating from a public land grant university created by our ancestors’ collective efforts. Many people went through great sacrifices so that you could be here ...
“I would have no bootstraps if my parents had not bought the boots. Our family survived because my grandmother cleaned other people’s houses. She scrubbed toilets so her family would have food on the table. I could not have gone to Yale Law School in the ‘70s if thousands of people hadn’t marched for equality in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Walk humbly as if you got there with help, because you did.”
The last two things I counseled the graduates to do were: 1) to listen their hearts, follow their joy, and 2) don’t quit on the university (2012), our country, or themselves.
Stay strong sisters and brothers. Take care of each other, we are in this together.
Charles Dumas is a lifelong political activist, a professor emeritus from Penn State, and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. Congress in 2012. He is a Lions Paw honoree. He lives in State College with his wife and partner of over 50 years.