COLUMN: A Commencement message that you will never hear

From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00 From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00Don't start crying just yet. The end of every school year flanks us with self-important petitions to heed life's dutiful calls -- reminders that life is precious, grades are meaningless and college is better than finding the perfect tax shelter. Our friends become wise ministers of truth, our parents become beacons of light and the spirit of Confucius infects newspaper columnists everywhere. In May, everyone is Brother Stephen, proselytizing to the world. And when the graduation speaker has assumed the podium, beware the emptiness of the moment. There really isn't anything out there worth paying attention to. Fortunately, I have no advice for you. I have no emotion. I have no wisdom. I would just as well instruct you to hit the hash pipe and never look back. Don't look to me to pat you on the ass with a few words of encouragement before you leave this island paradise for the real world. Let's be frank. I don't know you and I'm not going to try to give you a whole lot of insightful advice or meaningful commentary on "the way it is." I'm not going to tell you what you're doing wrong. I'm not going to comment on the nefarious role of the media in shaping our puny minds. I'm not going to talk about what's wrong with the world, or tell you how to make it better. In fact, if anything, I will leave you with one thing -- stop caring about all those things. When it comes time to graduate, don't go out there and change people's lives because chances are the changes you want won't blow over all that well with other people. Go out there and leave people alone. Let them do drugs. Let them get fat. Let them rot in front of the television. We are all here as idealists -- students with the capacity to change the world. But as activists, as change-mongers, as individuals seeking solutions for others, we merely propagate problems. In my eyes, the most dangerous thing in the world is the misguided notion that we can be the solution to a problem. This obsession with solutions captures the swell of sentiments surrounding the entire graduation process. Students gloss over the doom of their impending graduation with happy rhetoric like "changing the world," "goals" and -- of course -- "solutions." Like a high school football coach leading the charge onto the field or the crazed general ordering his soldiers into battle, this is the time of year when everyone strives to find the inspirational bugle call for the charge into the real world. This of course is not limited to seniors. Everyone gets swept away by this spring spirit of inspiration. As a freshman, I watched the Class of 1999 gleefully march down the Walk toward a distant destination on their Hey Day, chewing styrofoam and benevolently caning friends and foes alike. I stood there and considered my own fate. I considered my mistakes and the things I wanted to accomplish. I considered my future and my dreams. But as an ascending senior, what we are really celebrating in our drunken revelry is our accession not into the University's throne, but its ejection chair. For every May, like clowns out of a cannon, another few thousand undergraduates are shot out of the bowels of West Philadelphia to distant places like New York and New York. And we'll be ready to bail because we're going to change the world. Or not. I don't care who gives the graduation speech, be it a Nobel Laureate or God herself, once you hear them spout out inspirational quotables, I recommend tuning out. Examine the sky. Explore the soles of your shoes. Beware of words like "greatness," "success" and "you." Everyone is going to try to tell you how to live your life, and I say don't listen to a word. One day we'll realize we don't need solutions to everything. Sometimes, we're better off not caring about what other people do with their time. In fact, maybe we're all better off not proposing solutions to every problem, even our own. One of the great things about life is those rare moments when you're about to get shot out of a cannon. Just make sure you don't land on me.