[Editor’s note: One of the jk blogging community members, MBK, was at the UMass Dartmouth commencement this past weekend. She took pictures and notes and put together a report to share with us. ]   - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –   The Kerrys at UMass Dartmouth commencement, May 27, 2007  

  The 2007 commencement of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth was held at the campus’s outdoor Vietnam Veterans Peace Memorial Amphitheater. What more fitting venue for a speech by John Kerry could there possibly be?

The amphitheater was overflowing with graduates, faculty, and family and friends of graduates, all there for the main event: the awarding of degrees. <!-more-> But there was also a big bonus for all of us there that morning. First, there was the awarding of honorary degrees to four interesting and most worthy people, the Director of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists; a beloved Congregationalist minister from Fall River, MA; a landscape designer and author of several thoughtful books on gardens; and, last, but by no means the least, the ever delightful Teresa Heinz Kerry.

In presenting Teresa her degree, the U Mass Dartmouth Chancellor cited Teresa’s work as (my notes, the quote may not be exact) “passionate and compassionate philanthropist, as public servant, and intrepid advocate”, noting along the way Teresa’s “brilliant intellect”. These are all reasons enough to earn her several awards for her work. But then there is also the fact of Teresa’s Portuguese ancestry, a fact not lost on a region with a rich Portuguese / Brazilian-immigrant culture, nor on a campus with its own popular major in Portuguese Studies. If Teresa (who, like the rest of the honorary degree recipients, did not speak during the ceremony) had managed to say even two words in Portuguese to the assembled crowd, pandemonium would surely have ensued. A pity that we didn’t get to hear from Teresa (her spouse quipped later in the day that “my wife speaks 5 languages and has opinions in all of them”) or her fellow degree recipients, but great choices on the part of U Mass Dartmouth: all of them, in the words of the Chancellor, are indeed “people who have used their education to truly make a difference”.

Second, there was the award of the prestigious. rarely awarded and much-deserved Chancellor’s Medal to Sen. John Kerry, who offered up a fine talk, both very funny and deeply serious.

Overviews of the event, and biographies of all the awardees , can be found at the university website here and in this news account.

U Mass Dartmouth also promises a video of Kerry’s speech “as soon as possible at” www.umassd.edu/commencement/.

With those summaries available, I’ll just highlight here the most memorable moments for me.

The Chancellor introduced Sen. Kerry as “our own Senator, and, I only wish, our own president”, and described his “service defined by principle and action”. Yes, this is the man I voted for, with pride and hope, in November 2004.

As JK approached the podium, a man several rows behind me yelled out for all of southern Massachusetts and at least half of Rhode Island to hear, “WE LOVE YOU, JOHN!”. I grinned with recognition of a kindred spirit.

Sen. Kerry started his talk by talking about the choices he faced in preparing his speech, trying to decided between a 120-minute policy talk on global warming and other serious issues of the day, or a 10-minute talk on a lighter note. As both the johnkerry.com live bloggers here, and the newspaper accounts have already noted, he chose the 10-minute version (actually, I suspect it was really about 20 minutes in all), reeling out the one-liners, with surprisingly contemporary pop references, one after the other.

But, at the end, he got serious. Here are some of Sen. Kerry’s lessons, as recorded imperfectly by hand by me:

“Your hard work and aspirations have come to fruition at a hard time. What’s important is that you don’t become cynical and walk away from the choices that make a life well-lived”.

Speaking about good and the bad he’s seen in his forty years of public service, and, (I’d guess, holding special thoughts for the unspeakable last few years), he said:

“I’ve . . seen a level of procrastination, a level of avoidance, a level of irresponsibility, and a level of danger growing that challenges all of us. And what I know after all those years is it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“We need you to care. If you think that global warming” (or any other disaster) is bigger than you. .that it’s futile to try to change things, my answer is: NO, IT’S NOT. Lech Walesa saw a strike, jumped a fence, and became president. Vaclav Havel left jail, and became president. On Earth Day, we—20 million of us strong—created accountability.

Recounting the birth of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other early legislative acts stemming from the first Earth Day, Kerry noted, “We didn’t even have the EPA,” among other things until people went out and made that happen. It wasn’t politicians that made that happen; YOU made that happen.You can make a difference. You can do it without any political labels. You can do it with the quality of your thinking.

”Some people didn’t like what we were doing” (in fighting to end the Vietnam War)“ and some people still don’t. . .But we didn’t’ get here by standing still”. He recounted one of his favorite lines (which I think is the description of the patriotism of Sen. Kerry in a nutshell), “My country right or wrong: when it’s wrong, make it right”.

Sen. Kerry concluded with this thought:

“What we have is not guaranteed, and some of it is at risk… When you get out of here, go out and build your families, build your net worth, build whatever you want, build your careers; just don’t forget to build your country while you are at it.”

After Sen. Kerry had finished, the Chancellor thanked him with these apt words: “Thank you for challenging us, as always, to be our best selves.”

OK, water under the bridge and all that, but I couldn’t help thinking, multiple times that day, how much our country lost in November 2004 when it failed to restore our own nation to its highest, best self. I kept thinking to myself, with wonder: “And half of my fellow citizens chose the other candidate, over this man, in 2004? And still others among us were too indifferent even to vote? Will we ever wake up to the full depth of what we havew lost?”

After the ceremony, as I inched along in the traffic jam, involuntarily contributing to global warming, a trio of 20-somethings (newly minted graduates?) walked by (yes, passed) my traffic-jammed car. One of them said to his friends, “He promised he wouldn’t give a campaign speech, but he gave a campaign speech!” Diplomatic silence from his two companions. The speaker then back-pedalled: “But he is a fantastic speaker”. Keeping my own diplomatic silence, I thought to myself, “Well, even the slow learners among us seem finally to be catching on.”

Onward and upward to our best selves.

MBK

PS. Speaking of best selves, that 77-year old graduate mentioned by the live bloggers turns out to be even more amazing than you already think. Dieter Kramsch was awarded his BA in anthropology summa cum laude. A fantastic achievement in itself, but there’s more: he plans to go on for his Ph.D. in the same field. And there’s still more: he already has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and an MD, and was a professor for many years at the University of Southern California and Boston University Schools of Medicine!

 

 

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MBK, thanks so much for the report and the pictures.