Apples,
trees.
My
granddaughter is her school's valedictorian this year and as such is
required to give a speech at graduation. I asked her what her talk
was going to be about.
“It
has to be about the present and the future”, she said.
“Oh,
and have you decided on what you're going to say?”
“Yes,”
she said, “The present sucks and the future is going to suck even
more.”
I
told her to call me if she needed any help fleshing out either
argument.
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6 comments:
Yesterday you linked to an article citing the toll of US military intervention. Added to the first gulf war, and the morbidity and mortality of the interceding sanctions, the numbers boggle the mind. I'm rattled by them, and not in a liberal guilt sense, or desire to take some sort of moral high ground over those who don't bother to struggle with or consider their gravity. But something else all together that is difficult to define. I'm constantly torn between insisting that as citizens we are all culpable for these crimes and an awareness that US foreign policy is, and maybe has been for some time, no longer responsive to the citizenry in any way. Wherever that dilemma lands is beyond me. But those numbers in conjunction with terms like genocide and war crimes ought to be central to every election cycle. I'm numb for the victims. And the numbness comes from suspecting that the prevailing blind inertia infusing our society suggests we may not reach a day when we can look back on these events with clarity and reckon with the burden it brings or atone for our actions.
Sounds like your granddaughter is a very smart, aware, young person. How rare these days - must take after her grandfather.
Sounds like your granddaughter won't be bullshitting her way into the elite class anytime soon. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing actually.
Awareness of morals never got anybody anything as far as I can tell.
Apples and Trees indeed! If possible I'd be delighted if you'd post a copy should chance present itself. She's going to have to be pretty wiley to get anything less than 'glib' past the monitors.
Better, if she has what she'd like to have told her peers there is nothing more enlightening than 'youthful honesty' to gut punch the aged & complacent.
Her school mentors may not appreciate it but we'd eat it up here!
Right. She pointed out that the Principal had to review and approve her speech. I asked what the harm was in giving the principal one version and the audience another...
That wry humor may be genetic surprises me less than what an appealingly subversive grandfather you are.
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