David McCullough delivers keynote

Wheaton College commencement address May 18, 2002.
Author David McCullough, speaker

"President Marshall, distinguished trustees, distinguished members of the faculty, parents, friends of Wheaton College, members of the Class of 2002. The great Class of 2002.

I am not, alas, speechless. I'm Irish, and we are not known for being speechless.

You and I and all of us live in a land abundant with choices. No people in history have ever had so many choices in everything. In what we read, in what we eat, what we do, where we go, what we think, how we worship, what we plan and build for the future.

Do you realize, for example, that every time you go into a grocery store--a modern supermarket--there are 30,000 items to choose from. The ultimate cornucopia, if you will. There are 318 models of light trucks and cars to choose from when you decide how you are going to get around. Go into any one of the giant bookstores that are everywhere today and there are about 150,000 titles on the shelves. You choose.

Turn on the television set and in most households everywhere in the country there are an average of no less than 74 channels to choose from.

And how about the ways that you can pick to make a living? Had you lived in the old times, had you lived, let's say, in the crucial year of 1776, you would have had the choice, if you were educated, of maybe being a lawyer, a doctor or a preacher. If uneducated, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. All told, there were 80 vocations to choose from, if you were a man.

Today according to the U.S. Department of Labor there are no less than 822 specific vocations to choose from in this land and that's just the beginning because all these definitions of vocation include a substrate of various elements within the discipline within the vocation.

You have a choice of work, you have a choice in the way that you love. You can choose work you love, you can choose a partner you love, you can choose where you go, how you go, when you go.

In a way you might say that life is the ultimate multiple-choice test. At Wheaton you have had 25 departments of study to choose from. That's hardly a patch on what's in store for you now.

I would like to suggest some choices. I suggest you choose to do work you love. I suggest you remain students all your lives. If there is a highway, if there is a road to take in the pursuit of happiness, that's the one. From all that I have experienced, from all that I know, that's the path to follow. If you have 74 channels to choose from, there is another choice you have, and that's the choice to turn the thing off.

Let's not be a nation of spectators. Let's be builders. Build your own library, for example. Read, read, read history. By all the surveys, alas, you know too little history, but you can begin now.

At my graduation my aunt gave me a book about the Civil War, a book by Bruce Catton called "A Stillness at Appomattox." I never read a book like that and it changed me. Books can change you and the book that will change you the most, if I'm any judge, you haven't read yet. Let's choose to help those who haven't gotten the choice you have. Those who have little or no choice.

Let's not forget all we have been given and that obligations go with the privilege of education and advantage. Let's choose to help the sick and the aged and the afflicted and the illiterate. How much choice does one have who's dying of AIDS? How much choice does an uneducated, single mother of two children working in a convenience store have? How much choice does anyone have who can't read? And the illiteracy rate in Massachusetts today, disgracefully, is higher than it was in the 18th century.

Let's not forget we are at war and that our enemy is violently opposed to anything like freedom of thought or freedom of religion. They are fighting for and believe in enforced ignorance.

Let's choose to be good citizens, to take part as citizens to create, sustain, improve the good society. Let's be generous and not just with our money, but generous in spirit. And let's have good humor. And when you're choosing a partner, which may be the most important of all choices, be sure and pick someone with a sense of humor. It will sustain you longer than almost any quality of character I know.

I want to tell you a little story about New England history, about a woman named Elizabeth Parmelee, Class of 1927, Wheaton College, who went on from Wheaton to become one of the first three women ever to earn a master's degree of education at Harvard. She was descended from a long line of New Englanders who arrived here on these shores in the great migration that brought such people as John Adams' forebears, Abigail Adams' forbears. John Parmelee came to this country in 1636 and began what was a succession of generations of sea captains. Miss Parmelee's great grandfather, Hezekiah Parmelee, was lost at sea in 1867 in a Caribbean hurricane. Her father, Charles Parmelee, settled in Providence in the 1890s and began an oyster business in Narragansett Bay, which lasted until the hurricane of 1938.

Miss Parmelee never married because if you were devoting your life to education, that wasn't permitted for women. What she did instead was to serve for 40 years as a primary school principal. Forty years. When asked once how she achieved what she did, why she was so exceptional, she said that she was part of a patch quilt of all the people she had known who had influenced her, helped her, affected her, inspired her. And there is in that fundamental colorful patch quilt to be sure an essential American goodness. She still teaches those who take care of her. And what she is teaching above all is a life of decency.

There are no people in our society who deserve more credit, who are doing more important work, and who will continue to do more important work and need to be raised substantially in our eyes and in the estimates and in the appreciation of society at large than our teachers.

Miss Parmelee is here for her 75th Wheaton College reunion. She is unable to stand up.

It was said often, and we have all heard it or read it after September 11, we are living in a dangerous, threatening time and certainly we are.

It was also said it's the worst time we have ever been through. That is absolutely not so. There have been darker, more difficult, far more uncertain times again and again in our past.

You take heart, draw strength from our own story. Know who you are because of how they got you here, those who went before us. One of the most moving lines I know in the written record of the 18th century is from Abigail Adams who said, "I wonder if future generations will ever know what we have suffered on their behalf."

In the darkest time of the American Revolution, when she knew what was at stake, she wrote to her husband John Adams in far off Philadelphia, "You cannot be nor would I wish you to be an inactive spectator. We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions to correspond to them."

Some day, you of the Class of 2002, some day make the choice of doing something for your country.

(Standing ovation.)

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