Commencement 2011: what 10 eminent speakers told graduates

Here are the Monitor's hand-picked highlights from the 2011 commencement season.

10. Tony Kushner, playwright, Muhlenberg College

Tom Wallace/Newscom
May 10, 2009 Tony Kushner, world famous award winning playwright came out of his writing closet to pose for photos on the 9th floor of the Guthrie theater, Minneapolis, MN on May 10, 2009.

Everywhere, the world is in need of repair. Fix it. Solve these things. You need only the tools that you have learned here, even if you didn't pay as much attention as you should, even if you're a mess and broke and facing a future of economic terror. Who isn't? Who doesn't?

Help. Help. Help. The world is calling. Heal the world, and in the process, heal yourself. Find the human in yourself by finding the citizen, the activist, the hero. Down with the brutal-minded misadventurers. Go after them. You know where they are....

Duty calls. The world calls. Get active. No summer vacation, no rest for you. We have been waiting too long for you. We need your contribution too desperately, and if they tell you your contribution is meaningless, if they tell you the fix is in and there's no contribution to be made, if they tell you to contribute by shopping your credit card into exhaustion, if they tell you to surrender the brilliant, dazzling confusion your education should have engendered in you, exchange that quicksilver prolificity for dull monotone certainty, productive only of aggression born of boredom and violence, born of fear, born of stupidity, they're lying. Don't trust them; get rid of them. You know who they are. Shout down the devil.

10 of 10
You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.