Worthy of Honor

For those of you that don't mind reading a speech (note to self - just lost most of your audience), here's the text of my address to tonight's Watertown High School National Honor Society Inductees. I have high hopes for these students!

Watertown High School

National Honor Society Induction October 20, 2011

Good evening, and welcome to this wonderful evening on which we celebrate the very honorable success of these seniors before us. Great praise is due to those parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, coaches, mentors who have lavished love and help on these young men and women. Behind every successful young person are some other people who supported that success, and if you’re one of those people in the audience, we thank you.

And to tonight’s inductees, I speak for us all when I say we are so proud. Let me first honor you. You’ve managed to earn top grades in demanding courses, serve others with your free time, and earn the respect of your faculty, all while being a teenager, which is hard enough all by itself. Tonight we honor you for your success. You’ve faced challenges – some of you even more than others – but you’ve put together a beautiful high school career.

And I get the chance tonight to invite you to keep that going, but with a twist. Because I don’t want you to just lead successful lives; I want you to lead lives that are beautiful. The successful life earns the praise of others; but the beautiful one makes them stop and wonder. The successful person accomplishes good things for oneself, while the beautiful person also does something good for this world.

I’m obviously not talking about physical appearance here. I’m talking about a life well-lived, a life that has inner beauty because it is good and purposeful. More than a string of A’s on your report card or a big number on your paycheck, this kind of life is truly honorable.

But it’s hard to achieve because in the days and weeks and years to come, you’re going to be tempted to settle for the banal, or to slip toward the brutal. I have my killer alliterative B’s rolling tonight – you know that letter most of you don’t see very often your report cards.

The beautiful instead of the brutal and the banal. Let me define, illustrate, and then encourage.

Brutality is the worst that humans offer our world. It refers to everything that is savage, cruel, rude, even inhuman. If you’re hungry, to be brutal is to steal your neighbor’s food, or – as is true in a commercial I saw during a baseball game the other night – to eat your child’s fish. Brutality evokes that response of something just not being right.

Banality is different. It’s not brutal, it’s just commonplace. Banal means unoriginal, boring, something so ordinary, it’s not a pleasure, not something really worth our time and attention. A banal response to hunger is maybe just eating chicken nuggets, or white bread PB and Js, and doing that meal after meal, day after day. It’s not wrong, it’s just no way to live.

Now beauty can just be a pleasing appearance, but it also can refer to what’s glorious and good and meaningful. A hungry person with a taste for beauty creates a meal worth remembering. It’s calories, but it’s also art. Go to a brutal restaurant, and you hear them slaughtering the animals out back or you see roaches running across the floor. Go to a banal one, and you just leave feeling full. But a beautiful dining experience, and you remember it for days or even years.

This world, and actually each one of here tonight, needs beauty. We need experiences that move and inspire us, and we need you to be people who develop a knack for making beauty, and living beautifully.

One more illustration about how hard this is, but how important this is. And then I’ll bring it home for you, NHS seniors of Watertown High. As a parent, I must not become brutal. My three children depend on me to not hurt them, not abuse them, not neglect them. They count on me to not be sarcastic with them, insult them, swear at them. They expect a lack of brutality, and I try my best to give them that. All parents, myself included, have a moment or two where we lose our temper and can be a little brutal. But if it becomes a pattern, then watch out, there go the kids.

Banality, that’s easier. I can make sure my kids are clothed and fed, but just sit them in front of the TV all afternoon. I can give them the minimum, but never really take the time to see something good and talented in them and call that out, never really let them know I love them to death. It’s not brutal, but it’s all too common.

What my kids will really be changed by is if I can pull off beautiful parenting for them, firm in my limits, warm in my praise, going on adventures with them that teach them about the world and help them take risks, even while they’re cared for each step of the way.

You’re not, I hope, going to be parents for quite some time, so tuck that away, but let me bring this invitation home to you in two areas.

Your academics. You’ve obviously been successful students, but I wonder how often you’ve done it while being bored, while assuming that school needs to be just banal. Well, it doesn’t. It happens once in a while, but I’ve rarely heard of a teacher who complains if you make a paper or project your own and do something surprising and creative with it, take an academic exercise and make it a thing of beauty. Do that this year, and you and your teachers will be happier. And next year, when you head off to college, find something you like doing, and do it extraordinarily well. You’ve done well enough in high school that you’re going to have great opportunities next year – all of you. Take that opportunity and make it worth your while. The world doesn’t need more people who are bored by their jobs or do them with mediocrity. So get used to doing something special, something beautiful with your work. Don’t settle for the ordinary, even if that can get you a good grade.

And in your social lives, you’d be surprised – or maybe then again you wouldn’t – by how much brutality is all around you. And that’s going to increase next year, no matter where you go to college. People who rip and insult others, take advantage of them, and in the end only look out for themselves – that’s brutal, but it’s also pretty typical.

Instead, be something beautiful in your social lives, next year at college, but here too as Watertown seniors. Befriend someone new, and make their year worthwhile. Expand your universe of obligation – what we were talking about this morning – and stick up for someone who’s being gossiped about or trashed on Facebook. Compliment people, even if you don’t know them well. Take advantage of your peer mentorship in advisory, and really help an underclassman. Do something each week, or each day, that someone will feel is beautiful. And the treasure you give them, and get for yourself, will be immeasurable.

This is the highest honor, my amazing, wonderful inductees who look so beautiful tonight, to be a person who pushes out the brutal and doesn’t settle for the banal, but who makes and rises to beauty each day of your lives. Do that this year, Watertown High School will have never known a prouder, a more memorable, a more honorable NHS.

Thank you.

Then and Now

Another Era at WHS

Recently, I was invited by Bob Kaprelian ’53 and Bob Norton ’61 to host a tour of the school for the class of 1961’s fiftieth reunion. So over coffee and doughnuts, along with a couple of student reporters from The Raider Times, I walked with a couple dozen members of Watertown High’s past and chatted about our present and future.

I couldn’t help but draw some contrasts between life at WHS then and now and thought I’d share them with you.

Then you turned right upon entering the building and walked into the gymnasium and basketball court. Now in that spot there’s a library.

Then computers were students in math class working on problems; now they’re spread throughout the building for use in student research, learning, and production.

Then they had a headmaster named John J. Kelly; now we have a John J. Kelly gymnasium.

Then the cafeteria opened up to a courtyard next to a track and open space in front of the cemetery. Now there’s still a courtyard, but that open space is covered by the athletics and physical education area and by art, photography, and design studios.

Then the academy award for best picture went to West Side Story. Now it’s one of the possible choices for a winter musical (Or at least it was a few years back; this year we’re running Seussical.)

Then the landmark novel To Kill a Mockingbird was written by Harper Lee. Now our ninth graders read it in English class.

Then the two genders had separate PE classes and only girls took home economics classes and only boys went to the wood shop. The Hoyt Thurber award for the best student athlete was given only to a graduating young man. We still have PE classes but they are mixed gender, and plenty of boys enroll in Foods and Nutrition, while plenty of girls work in the wood shop, often – Mr. Boudreau claims – with more patience and skill. And there are, and will be again this year, two Hoyt Thurber awards, for an outstanding male and female student athlete.

Then they held Armenian bake sales from time to time. We have one this week!

Then probably too many of the youth of Watertown smoked and/or drank, but not everyone thought it was a problem. Now too many of the youth of Watertown smoke or drink, and we see it as a problem for their health and safety.

Then kids picked on each other and did horrible things to someone from time to time but there wasn’t a specific word for it and it largely happened below the radar. Now we call it bullying and are trying to put a stop to it.

I’m suspicious of the belief in the inevitable progress of humankind and an ever-brighter future, and I have no time for the sentiment that today’s youth are somehow worse than those of the past or that society’s running itself into the toilet. Neither the past nor the present is a uniquely golden era. We’re neither better nor worse from one another, just different.

But I do think it’s nice to stop and take perspective once in a while and notice where we are and where we came from before going back and making the best we can of these times we live in, while still enjoying that coffee and doughnut, of course.