Baccalaureate
Speech
Sean
Flammer
May
19, 2002
Ladies and Gentlemen, Parents, Friends, Family, Staff, but most
importantly, my Fellow Students:
When I was first asked to
give this speech, I was so grateful and stunned at the honor that, in shock, I
said “sure” and I walked away, thinking “wow, that’s really cool.” And then I
really didn’t think about it again. But as the weeks passed and the days drew
closer and closer to this day, I began to think about it again and wonder what
I’d say. That just rhymed. I was hoping I would somehow be miraculously
inspired by something, but nothing really happened. So I was forced to look within myself and to try to come up with
something.
Within 24 hours most of us will be gone and
within 48 hours almost all of us will be gone.
We’ll be in 50 different states and almost every continent, except for
Antarctica. And when we go to these
various places around the world, we surely at some point— whether its several
days or just weeks down the road—at some point, we are going to look back and
we are going to miss Grinnell. But what
is it about Grinnell that we’ll be missing? I began to think about this question. What is it that I’ll be missing?
I asked myself: Is it the classes? Yeah, but there’s something more to it than
that. Is it the professors? Yeah, but
there’s still, sorry, there’s still a little more to it. Without a doubt it’s
the students. But what are the
qualities, these characteristics that are so commonly found in Grinnell
students? What is it that makes them so
unique?
I did this introspection and
I went back to my daily routine, keeping this question in the back of my
mind. And then for the first time since
I’ve been at Grinnell, I left campus for the weekend. Now I have to do a little
digression here: Next year I’ll be doing Teach For America, teaching down in
the Mississippi Delta. Teach for
America has locations throughout the country and most students who are accepted
they want to go to San Francisco or to Chicago; very few people want to go to
Mississippi. So when people are
accepted to the Delta region they have the equivalent of an “accepted student
weekend.” All the people come down and
we get to meet each other and spend a day in the classrooms to see what it is
like. It was a really good time and I
want to tell you about it.
On Thursday morning a friend of mine, and
maybe a friend of yours, Amanda James, took me to the airport. And as we’re sitting in the car we don’t
even think of turning the radio on. We just start talking. And we talked all the way to Des
Moines. We talked about all the normal
stuff that friends talk about—classes, what’s going on in our lives, what’s
going on with our families, our plans for next year, all stuff that friends
normally talk about. But we also talked
about poverty in the developing world, we talked about the IMF and dept
forgiveness, we talked about
masculinity and feminism, about shopping malls and how there’s a lot of
junk out there. We talked about these and various other topics that are in no
way related to each other, and when one person said something that the other
didn’t understand we asked questions.
And when we didn’t agree, we disagreed and we articulated as best we
could why we disagreed. We had a great
conversation. We did what we are used
to doing here – engaging ourselves with one another. We had a great
conversation, but like most things in life, neither of us realized it.
When I arrived in the south I met the other
Teach For America corps members who were participating in the weekend’s
activities and we all put on nametags and shook hands and asked where we were
from and all the other stuff that goes along with that type of thing. And as I got to know them (as much as you
can in a weekend) I determined that a lot of them could fit right in at
Grinnell- they were smart and they wanted to do something good with their
lives. But on our last evening, in
particular, a few of us sat around and we talked for a few hours. Although the conversation wasn’t as good as
the conversation I had with Amanda, it was good conversation.
I have to tell you, though, the main
difference was that during the course of the conversation, two out of the five
people commented, repeatedly, that at their schools they can not have that type
of a conversation--where you talk about important, things, things that matter,
things that you care about, things that engage you. And it was in that hotel room in that late night at that shady,
shady hotel on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, 600 miles from campus,
where I found the answer to my question, where I truly found what makes
Grinnell students so unique and, thus, what makes Grinnell so great: the extremely dynamic, independent,
interesting, and interdisciplinary students.
And then I went to the airport and I was
walking through the hall to my gate and I was thinking: This is what I want to say. This is my speech, right now. This is it. This is it--that exogenous
variable that I was looking for to inspire me.
But I have to tell you that wasn’t the highlight of my trip because
right at the gate, I met Mr. Ike Turner who signed a picture for me. And I have it right here. Ike Turner.
He’s 70 years old, but he’s still rocking. Ike Turner, the highlight of my trip.
But I just want to
close saying that next year when I’m in Mississippi and its nighttime and I’m
staring at that Mississippi Moon next fall and my thoughts begin to wonder, I
know that many of them will be thoughts of you. And I’m sure that wherever you are, when your minds begins to wander
you will do the same. Our friends, our classmates, even the people that we only
met once or twice—they are what we’ll miss. They are our Grinnell
experience. They are Grinnell
Congratulations. Thank you very
much. And good luck!
