“I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with ’em later.” – Mitch Hedberg
For countless reasons, I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. I have traveled more than most people I know, and I have never gone to bed hungry. If I had 30 seconds to give the best advice possible to young people, it would probably go something like this: All Children are Our Children! Be humble and true to yourself, and try to be kind and compassionate to all living beings, especially animals. Adopt a plant-based diet (of course!), think critically (question everything), and travel. Always speak out against injustice (remember, silence = complicity), and whatever you do, laugh, love, and create, as much as possible, and never forget that All Children are Our Children. Did I mention travel? Oh, and one more thing. You are beautiful, and we love you! 🙂
“By discouraging critical thinking, schools ensure a docile and compliant population.” – John Taylor Gatto
Schools are designed to create obedient workers, not thinkers. My true education didn’t begin until after college. Only then did I start to travel, and read books that transformed my life. The legendary Howard Zinn taught me to question, and then helped to change the way that I see the world. Before I re-post the outstanding “Advice for the Young” pieces by beloved writers Mary Schmich, and Kurt Vonnegut, I would like to share a life altering concept that I learned from the great Howard Zinn, in his iconic book, “A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present“.
Excerpt from “A People’s History of the United States” (that slowly changed everything for me):
“What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor–inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing–permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”– Howard Zinn
I later learned that James Baldwin had shared a similar sentiment that also hit the nail on the head:
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” – James Baldwin
Author Omar El Akkad echoed a related view in his fine book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”.
“And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
In other words, All Children are Our Children. In recent years, I have been telling my students, and frankly, anyone who will listen, the following elevator pitch: “What do you think Mark Twain meant when he said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice”? You will likely forget my name, but don’t forget this idea. If you don’t have one, get a passport, and travel. The more you travel, the more humble you will become, and the more you will realize that we are all brothers and sisters, and that All Children are Our Children. Once you know that, everything changes.”
“Kurt Vonnegut” by Blake Hughes
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
One of my favorite writers is Kurt Vonnegut. I recently stumbled across a wonderful piece by Pulitzer Prize winning author Mary Schmich, called “Wear Your Sunscreen” (shared below), which was wrongly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. According to Maggie Choo, “The “wear sunscreen speech” became one of the most unexpected cultural phenomena of the late 1990s. Mary Schmich, a Chicago Tribune columnist, wrote this collection of life advice in 1997. She never delivered it as a formal speech, it was just a hypothetical commencement address in her column…The text found its way to early internet email chains right after publication. People wrongly credited it to author Kurt Vonnegut (as a graduation speech that he had written), which made it spread even faster…The sunscreen graduation speech has crossed language barriers and continues to appeal to audiences more than twenty years later. It even showed up as a clue on Jeopardy! in 2019. This piece shows how a simple newspaper column became a cultural touchstone…and explains why its straightforward, honest advice still matters today.”
And what did Kurt Vonnegut think about Mary Schmich’s column being falsely credited to him? As per Mr. Vonnegut, “What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” So, without further ado, here is the famous “Advice” column from Mary Schmich. 🙂
Mary Schmich
Columnist Mary Schmich
Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young
“Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates. I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind.
You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll lookback at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.”
– Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Mary Schmich
Click here for the original piece from the Chicago Tribune.
Click here to learn more about Mary Schmich from Northwestern University journalist Andrew Donlan.
Click here to learn more from Maggie Choo.
Click here for a video of Mary Schmich’s influential “Wear Sunscreen” column.
Kurt Vonnegut
Self Portrait by Kurt Vonnegut
“If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young”, by Kurt Vonnegut, collects the graduation addresses the legendary writer delivered at nine different colleges over the quarter century between 1978 and 2004. As per its introduction, “After the publication of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five brought him worldwide acclaim in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut became one of America’s most popular graduation speakers…Vonnegut had become an underground hero of the youth of the sixties who were hungry for new ways of looking at the world and alternatives to the status quo…Vonnegut’s work spoke to young people, and that appeal has never faded. His novels, essays, and stories are taught in colleges and high schools throughout the U.S., and as Prof. Shaun O’Connell of the University of Massachusetts at Boston has told me, “It’s hard to get students to read Updike and Bellow any more, but they still love Vonnegut.”
Kurt Vonnegut
If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Advice for the Young
Excerpts from 9 graduation speeches (mostly):
“I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome. Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?
I am a Humanist, or Freethinker, as were my parents and grandparents and great grandparents, and so not a Christian. By being a Humanist, I am honoring my mother and father, which the Bible tells us is a good thing to do. But I say with all my American ancestors, “If what Jesus said was good, and so much of it was absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”
If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.
I would just as soon be a rattlesnake. Revenge provokes revenge which provokes revenge which provokes revenge — forming an unbroken chain of death and destruction linking nations of today to barbarous tribes of thousands and thousands of years ago.
By working so hard at becoming wise and reasonable and well-informed, you have made our little planet, our precious little moist, blue-green ball, a saner place than it was before you got here…Most of you are preparing to enter fields unattractive to greedy persons, such as education and the healing arts. Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Don’t give up on books. They feel so good — their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding whether what our hands are touching is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.
One of the things [Uncle Alex] found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
That’s one favor I’ve asked of you. Now I ask for another one. I ask it not only of the graduates, but of everyone here, parents and teachers as well. I’ll want a show of hands after I ask this question. How many of you have had a teacher at any level of your education who made you more excited to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible? Hold up your hands, please. Now take down your hands and say the name of that teacher to someone else and tell them what that teacher did for you. All done? If this isn’t nice, what is?
So what does this Methuselah (a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who is claimed to have lived the longest life, dying at 969 years of age), have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe
Heller, author, as you know, of Catch-22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed worldwide over the past forty years?” Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.” I said, “What’s that, Joe?” And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Artist: Unknown
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
My father was a gun nut, like Ernest Hemingway, mainly to prove that he wasn’t effeminate, even though he was an architect and a painter. He didn’t get drunk and slug people. Shooting animals was enough.
You’re learning that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable social structure, that the older people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So homes can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons…
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
When things go well for days on end, it is a hilarious accident.
Artist: Unknown
Make love when you can. It’s good for you.
Queer travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
No matter how corrupt and greedy our government and our corporations and our media and Wall Street and our religious and charitable organizations may become, the music will still be perfectly wonderful. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC…The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian among other things, told me that, during the era of slavery in this country, an atrocity from which we can never fully recover, the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. Al Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not. They could play the blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played.
There is only one rule that I know, Goddammit, you’ve got to be kind.
You know what else I think? I think life is no way to treat an animal, and not just people, but pigs and chickens, too. Life just hurts too much.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?
And you know why I think he (US President George W. Bush), was so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”
I got a letter from a sappy woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat, a friend of the working stiffs. She was about to have a baby, not mine. She wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world as awful as this one is. I told her that what made life almost worth living for me was the saints I met. These were people who behaved compassionately and capably, no matter what, and they could be anywhere. So maybe some of you tonight are or may became saints for her child to meet. Most of us are loaded with Original Sin. But a surprising number of us, not me, God knows, are loaded with Original Virtue. Ain’t that sweet?
A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for President of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.” Some platform. A paraphrase of the Beatitudes. And again: Hooray for our team.
My politics in a nutshell: Let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need.
I apologize. I said I would apologize; I apologize now. I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.” So you know what I’m going to do? I declare everybody here a member of Generation A. Tomorrow is another day for all of us.
As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.
There was one thing I forgot to say, and I promised I would say, and that is, “We love you. We really do.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Advice for the Young
Artist: Cristian Ibarra Santillan
The World is on Fire
“There are two issues of our time, really, that I think amount to a litmus test for morality as far as I’m concerned. One is what you’re prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people. And the other is what are you prepared to do on behalf of gay and lesbian peoples?” – Poet & Activist June Jordan (1936-2002)
The United States and Israel are the two biggest agents of terror in the world, and the greatest threats to the survival of our species. The US-Israeli Genocide in Gaza is one of the worst crimes in human history. Did you know that the United States has murdered over 20 million innocent people (in 37 different nations), since World War 2, and tens of millions more in its 250 year history? Killing and destruction are what the United States, and Israel, do best. As per Kurt Vonnegut, in his book, A Man Without a Country, “Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen the First World War…Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine.”
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – Comedian George Carlin
“All Governments Lie.” – I.F. Stone
The US-Israeli genocide in Palestine has changed everything, and exposed everyone (even friends, and family members). Fortunately, the younger generation gives us a reason for hope. According to a recent NBC poll, although 50% of Americans still sympathize with the genocidal state, and society, of Israel, 74% of young people, aged 14-29 (Generation Z), sympathize with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. This is an encouraging departure, considering the mountain of lies and pro-genocide propaganda that most people in the US are bombarded with on a daily basis (vomited up by outlets like NBC, and the mass murdering psychopaths running the US/Israeli empire). Of course, the premise of the poll is flawed because you can’t “2 Sides” genocide, and again, it is NBC, which is a part of a US corporate media landscape that basically serves the US war machine. However, it is still noteworthy that the majority of young people are believing what they are seeing live-streamed, with their own eyes, rather than what they are being told by their lying government, and the dishonest mainstream media.
“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” – Mark Twain
Finally, since laughter is cheap medicine, here is a clip of Palestinian-American comedian, Sammy Obeid, knocking it out of the park. This 2.5 minute segment is impressive, not only because it has a “6-7” bit that is laugh out loud funny, but also because of the artist’s ability to find humor in the darkest places.
Click here for the refreshing performance from comedian Sammy Obeid.
The Bottom Line? Young people everywhere who are kind, smart, and curious give me the most hope. What’s not to love?
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don”t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
Until next time…
Sending love to Palestine, Iran, Cuba, Lebanon, Venezuela, and all targets of the hegemonic US Empire.
FREE PALESTINE!
Artist: Carlos Latuff
*Adopt a Plant-Based diet today, and feel good about yourself. No animal will have to suffer and die in order for you to live. Plus, you will greatly reduce your risk of premature death from chronic disease, promote peace, and lessen your carbon footprint.
**Main Image: Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY
Additional Sources:
Click here to learn more from Thich Nhat Hanh.
