Observations©

By Donald S. Conkey

Date: May 28, 2009 - # 9922 - Title: Graduates: listen to those “who have been there” (820)

May is for graduates a time to reflect on the past while looking to the future. It’s a time to look back with fondness at the good times they had in school while wondering what the future holds, with I’m sure some trepidation, unsure of what that future holds for them. Let me assure you, as one who has been where graduates are today the sun has come up every day since I graduated from high school in 1945 and college in 1958.

            But the sun shines on a culture far different than the culture I was raised in. Today “change” is in, for good or evil. Technology allows the world to communicate today in ways I would never have dreamed of 60 years ago. While computers, e-mail, text mailing, blogging, cell phones, IPods, MP3, etc have added to our ability to communicate with the world almost instantaneously these gadgets  have brought with them new challenges to the world’s moral fiber that were once held sacrosanct.  And because the moral values, common not too many years ago have lost for many their relevancy, the challenges facing today’s graduates are real, perhaps more real, than the challenges my generation faced years ago. But remember graduates; solid moral and educational foundations are still prerequisites for the good life and these prerequisites have no generational boundaries.

            The new IT gadgets have been instrumental for today’s youth to adopt a culture that often downplays the moral values that once held young men and women to standards that helped them remain morally clean and pure before marriage. The new culture, often self-destructive for many, reminds us of just how fast cultures can change. Just 22 years ago former ABC’s TV’s Nightline Ted Koppel told Duke University graduates, “We [society] have convinced ourselves that slogans will save us. ‘Shoot up if you must, but use a clean needle.’ Enjoy sex whenever with whomever you wish; but protect yourself.” Koppel then said, “No. The answer is no. Not no because it isn’t cool or smart or because you might end up in jail or dying in an AIDS ward – but no, because it’s wrong. What Moss brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. Are – not were.”

            Compare what Koppel told Duke Graduates 22 years ago with what President Obama told Notre Dame Graduates last week. Regarding the issue of abortion Obama told each side of the debate we “can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.” Obama was right in one respect – abortion is a heart-wrenching decision with both moral and spiritual dimensions, but it is a decision that if Koppel’s ‘no’ had been applied months earlier it would not be the heart-wrenching decision it is for those that choose abortion today.

Koppel probably would not be allowed to reference the Ten Commandments at a Duke graduation today but what he said in 1987 is still true today, a decision to say ‘no’ should have been made before the decision to abort came up – by both parties. Koppel was also right that these are commandments, not suggestions, by He who created mankind and gave mankind a conscience to know right from wrong. Many, especially today’s youth, do not understand the Ten Commandments. While often viewed as only moral values, they were, in reality, 10 commandments given Moses to govern mankind’s relationship between 1. all mankind and God (2) and 2. mankind’s relationships with all others (8). These are the “Laws of God” Jefferson declared to be the cornerstone of liberty in his Declaration of Independence.

Koppel was speaking as one “who had been there.” Another address recently given by M. Russell Ballard to a large audience, that included many graduate aged attendees, expanded on this subject of listening to the advice of those “who have been there.” He quoted George Santayana words; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He then reminded his audience that both secular and religious history is a record of those cycles that mankind follow in predictable regularity.

These cycles are as sure as the sun comes up each morning. Ballard described these cycles as: “righteousness followed by prosperity, followed by material comforts, followed by greed, followed by pride, followed by wickedness and a collapse of morality until the people bring calamities upon themselves sufficient to stir them up to humility, repentance and change.”  

My hope for each graduate this year is that their parents have instilled into them those never changing moral values necessary to find real happiness in life and that their schooling has included enough history that they are sufficiently prepared to face the cycle-reality of the real-world they are stepping out into: stiff, often cut-throat competition, ever changing moral values, and the challenge of becoming a solid contributing member of a free society.