OOH …Here’s One Thing
Mother
by Jim Johnsen,
Managing Director, Johnsen, Fretty & Company
“Mother, should I trust the government?”
Pink Floyd
Heresy, and I cringe, but yet serve it up anyway, because it’s that good. Pearl Jam doing “Mother”:
https://youtu.be/kAh1jH5F_i4?si=mjSDn3Ff-0B_eiMk
My mother, God bless her, refuses to have an email address or anything more than a landline and a flip phone, which she keeps in her car and only turns on in case of emergency. She doesn’t want to run down the battery, God forbid. Texting. No sir. She is old school.
During my last visit I was absolutely crushed after I discovered that I had been propagating a lie for most of my life. She was not, in fact, her high school and college valedictorian. Holy merde, I must have told that to every last person who would listen.
My father, who is a junkie when it comes to any sort of modern war history (civil war on…including the Crimean and Boer wars), said to my youngest daughter while we sat around the dinner table, your grandma once had a date with General MacArthur. I thought to myself, WTH, 60 or so years and I never heard that one. Here comes a doozy. A long pause ensued. My mother then proceeded to tell Grace how during the spring semester of her high school senior year her best friend convinced her to play hookie and head into New York to attend the Macarthur victory celebration parade. (Turns out he wasn’t immediately recognized at the end of WWII but was later pardoned by Eisenhower (Truman hated the guy) which gave birth to the aforementioned parade (note this is all coming from my Dad and I have not fact checked it, but as an engineer his ability to ahem “riff” is almost non existent so my guess is it’s pretty reliable). Long story short, her friend’s father was a NYC police officer and spotted his daughter and my mom at the parade, and immediately reported them to school administration. As punishment she was stripped of her valedictorian honors. Shiitake mushrooms. That was her date with General Macarthur. (Who said the world hasn’t changed!). FWIW she still nailed the college one.
..but hey I am off script…back to the point. My emailess mother loves to send me packets of “suggested reading” via snail mail. For some reason these take weeks to get to me. It then takes me weeks to get through the pile. But if my mother took the time to cut it out and mail it on, I will be damned if I am going to throw it in the round file without reading it.
In the last packet was Ken Burns’ (yes I know certain readers will have a visceral reaction to that name on the spot) recent commencement speech to the 2024 graduates of Brandeis University. All I can say is “wow”. It really grabbed me by the shorts.
Here are a couple whoppers. Hope it entices you to read the whole thing:
“The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes.”
“We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. “
“”No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said.”
“In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer…addressed the young men’s lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” He asked his audience, “Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the earth and crush us at a blow?” Then he answered his own question. “Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” It is a stunning, remarkable statement,…”
“Lincoln’s words that day suggest what is so great and so good about the people who happen to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours. That’s the world you now inherit: our work ethic and our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power. “
“The best arguments in the world,” — and ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we do is argue — “the best arguments in the world,” he said, “Won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
“But it’s clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties.”
“Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. The inevitable vicissitudes of life, no matter how well gated our communities, will visit us all. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.”
“At some point, make babies, one of the greatest things that will happen to you, I mean it, one of the greatest things that will happen to you is that you will have to worry, I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself. It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise. Ask your parents.”
You can find the whole transcript here: Undergraduate Commencement Address by Ken Burns | Commencement 2024 | Brandeis University
Happy reading. You will make my Mother happy. 🙂
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