Strong Words Give Hope to the Future

Most of the commencement exercises have ended. The young men and women in the caps and gowns have been told that they are the future, that theirs is the challenge, that they are the shining hope of tomorrow.

At 6 o’clock last Wednesday, I was in the Ramona Bowl in Hemet to see my granddaughter, Zan Marie Thompson, graduate from Hemet High School with a scholarship from the Rotary Club in Idyllwild, where she lives.

Words of hope were spoken by three students, the principal and the school district superintendent. One student said: “We have been called the ‘Me generation.’ We will prove that is not true.”

Those speeches are hard to write and hard to deliver. You start with the certainty that whatever you say has been said before, by men and women of wisdom, distinction and fame. No matter what you put together, it sounds like an old speech. The young people at Hemet High gave it a fresh sound--maybe because of their youth and eagerness to get their diplomas. There were 480 in the graduating class, each one with parents, grandparents and friends to applaud and yell when they made their way to the stage.

We have heard so much lately about the meanness of America, of the lowering of standards and the acceptance of vulgarity and nastiness as the leitmotif of these times. We have almost begun to believe that such a life is inevitable. But here and there is a glimmer of truth.

Ted Koppel, the reasoning man of ABC’s “Nightline,” gave the graduates of Duke University some plain truths, unembellished by vistas of glory. He dared to mention random sex, AIDS and narcotics not as social nuisances, but as wrongs “because we have spent 5,000 years as a race of rational human beings, trying to drag ourselves out of the primeval slime by searching for truth and moral absolutes. In its truest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions.”

I first heard about the Ten Suggestions from my friend Nan Tepper, solid newswoman and executive at KCBS, about a year ago. It hit me in the face like a cup of cold water when she said it--and again when I read of Koppel’s speech. That’s what’s needed to catch our attention, to make us realize that lots of things are wrong. Lots of things don’t work. They are destructive, degrading and against what we have accepted for hundreds of years while we strained and tugged toward civilization.

Last week, Bob Abernethy, an NBC correspondent out of Washington, did two segments on the evening news called “Values in Education.” He was stationed at KNBC in Los Angeles for a number of years, and we spent hours together on press buses and at political events and conventions. Bob is a man of honor and steadfastness, and often in his commentator pieces, he lets it show, to my great satisfaction.

Courage, cooperation, loyalty and truth are some of the words that he used on the air. He was quoting boys and girls in a school, where he was doing his story. Those are words you don’t often hear, certainly not on an evening television program. Those words are often exemplified in a piece of film about someone saving a kid who fell through the ice, or a fireman going back into the blaze over and over to be sure everyone is saved. But you don’t hear those big strong words, with their sturdy texture.

One of the little boys in the Baltimore County class said what he thought about the word cooperation. The teacher had obviously told the story of Helen Keller, totally deaf and blind from the age of 19 months, and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, and the titanic struggle between the two when Annie was trying to teach the savage child to speak.

When the teacher asked the class to give examples of the words she had just explained to them, the small boy said: “Cooperation. Like Helen Keller. Her and Annie had to have cooperation for Annie to teach her to talk. Or else she would have gone back into that dark silence.”

The little boy’s words had a real understanding of what the teacher had been telling the class. And he gave it back to her with the simple strength of profound comprehension.

I congratulate my granddaughter for her graduation and her scholarship. And Ted Koppel for speaking such plain truths, plain as a block of wood. There is hope here. We will not lose what good men and women have labored so hard to make work through the centuries. And congratulations to Bob Abernethy for bringing to television viewers words that lately are as obscure and exotic as Urdu.

My candidate for a commencement speaker in about 40 years is that small boy in Baltimore County. He is one of those who will keep us from falling back into that dark silence.