But if not, I'm going on anyhow (Thoughts on MLK Day)

I wonder if, as he celebrated his 26th birthday in 1955, he could have imagined that journey that he had been prepared for, and that he was about to undertake.

Newly married, less than a year into his appointment at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, and working through the final draft of a painfully difficult dissertation in Systematic Theology, King could no more calm the coming hurricane of racial hatred than he could change the color of his skin or the commanding timbre of his voice.

"Lightning makes no sound until it strikes"

Because her parents could not afford a car, 15 year old Claudette Colvin took the bus to and from high school every day. Taking the bus was a twice daily reminder that her life did not matter as much as the lives of her fellow white passengers, who had paid the same fare but were privileged with a different bus-riding experience. It was the same for all black people in Alabama and beyond, not only did the multitude of informal sociocultural cues and signals sent that same message (Black lives don't matter), but even the very laws, requiring separation in restaurants, schools, and yes: buses.

Maybe it was the lessons on Civil Rights that she was learning at her high school, which would remain segregated for decades afterwards, or the paper she had just turned in about being forbidden from trying on clothes in department store dressing rooms because she was black.

Maybe it was the plain faced insult of being told that the standing white person was entitled to her seat in the colored section, leaving her to stand in the back as three others before her had already been ordered to do.

Maybe it was the deep seated animosity that had grown up between a vast multitude of people kidnapped and ransomed into forced labor, and a people so saddled with the guilt of their greed and cruelty that their collective consciences had long since been seared to the point of thinking that their privileged status came from some other source.

Maybe it was seeing the courage of the pregnant woman, Ruth Hamilton, who protested that she had paid her fare, and did not feel like standing. (Did Claudette know at this point that she herself was pregnant?)

“The time is always right to do the right thing”

Whatever the reason, she was not getting up, and when the police arrived she would still not get up, even after they had convinced the young black men in the next row to give up their seats, and even after Ruth had accepted the compromise and moved back a row, Claudette would not move and would force the officers to arrest her—she would be the first.

Jackie Robinson had refused to give up his seat on a US Army bus in Texas 10 years earlier, and faced a court marshal because of it (but was acquitted). Surely others had taken a stand on the issue before, but somehow the situation in Montgomery was different, and within a few months, several more young black women were charged with violating the bus segregation rules in Montgomery, including the most famous one that signaled the beginning of the official boycott.

By his next birthday, Dr. King would be fully engulfed in the controversy and struggle of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, which he had been asked to lead just before the arrest of Rosa Parks on 12/1/1955.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

E.D. Nixon, the President of the local NAACP chapter (no relation to that Nixon), had chosen Dr. King because he was relatively new to Montgomery, and had yet to experience the intimidation that was the hallmark of the town's ruling class. Nixon knew that the time had come to take the fight against segregation to the mainstream, and that the bus issue could unite black folks in Montgomery—but only in his most grandiose dreams could he have imagined the wide reaching impact that this work would ultimately achieve.

It is difficult for me at this stage of the history to reconstruct the motivations that prompt the potent villainy and ultimate cowardice that is terrorism. I have had some heated and emotional disagreements, but have never felt so threatened or insulted that I would resort to the use of an explosive device as a way of getting the last word in an argument.

For the young Dr. King, that is what came next.

Infuriating as it is to retell, two months after the arrest of Rosa Parks, and two weeks after his 27th birthday, Dr. King received the message that his home had been bombed, and he rushed home to look into the safety of his wife and infant daughter.

A group of supporters had assembled on His front lawn, and he had the unique opportunity to share in Christ's sufferings by convincing his followers to put away their swords, and commit themselves instead to the work before them rather than resorting to petty vengeance.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate."

In the days that followed they would take calls from their parents, filled with that fear and concern that only a parent can feel for their child. Martin Luther King Sr., who had for some time objected to his son's choice of Coretta Scott as his bride, arrived in Montgomery almost at the same time as Correta's father, mother, and brother. Obie Scott (Coretta's father) delivered the ultimatum that, lest Martin Jr. return with his young family to Atlanta, he would take his daughter and granddaughter back with him to Marion—a demand that Martin Sr. agreed with.

Four days earlier, Dr. King had been jailed for the first time in his life, and had committed himself more deeply to the struggle for the unqualified freedom of his people. Now Coretta would follow her husband's lead: committing herself to their cause in the face of legitimate fears, even of death, she refused to allow her father to dictate the terms of their retreat from Montgomery.

Coretta had been concerned for some time with taking up the mantle of a preacher's wife, and had wrestled with disappointment when they received the call to Dexter Baptist, but love for her husband and trust in her God persuaded her. Only now, facing the yawning abyss of hatred and hostility, did she see clearly the role that God had in mind for her and for her husband, and said with the conviction of a saint: let it be so. Amen.

"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

There would be at least six more bombings, and many other violent and hateful responses, but there was also the courage of countless men and women standing up for themselves and for their neighbors. Boycotters organizing and volunteering in carpools. Southern housewives who picked up their domestic employees, and taxi drivers who would only charge their customers the 10 cent fare that the buses charged.

Lloyds of London, which had gotten it's start insuring slave ship owners, agreed to insure carpool drivers that had been denied insurance by racist local agents who knew too well the economic impact of the boycott. Men and women, young and old hitchhiked, rode bicycles, or rode mules or in horse drawn carriages.

People acted out their principles by walking, choosing the exhaustion of a long walk after a full day's work to the humiliation of an insulting bus ride, and churches from all over the nation and beyond, inspired by this imitation of their own righteous and self-ambulatory messiah, sent in new and used shoes to replace those that had been worn thin by the protest, and funds to support their brethren now in need.

When Dr. King's house was bombed a second time, a crowd of hundreds of angry men gathered, and as he had done the first time, Martin now pleaded with his brothers:

If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the words of Jesus: "He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword". We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you". This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love. Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.

Criminalized and prosecuted, Dr. King chose to serve over a year in jail rather than pay a fine that might be seen as an acknowledgement that he had done something wrong, or else an example of his desire to preserve his own comfort. When the press learned of his noble conviction, they made national news of it, and he was released after only two weeks.

"I was proud of my crime. It was the crime of joining my people in a nonviolent protest against injustice."

A year after Rosa Parks had ridden that fateful bus, the Supreme Court would once again strike down southern segregation as unequal protection under the law (a violation of the 14th Amendment), just as it had done three years earlier in the matter of school segregation. The community at Montgomery would not be allowed, however, to celebrate they victory as violence and vengeance sought to reestablish through intimidation the rule of separate and unequal. In the short weeks between the ruling and Martin's 28th birthday, shootings, lynchings, and the firebombing of five black churches would overshadow any thoughts of celebration.

For the next decade, with every inch gained from nonviolent protest, and every life lost in violent response, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would show again and again that worthiness of his calling that he showed in those first two years. As the great apostle had predicted so many centuries before, the work of every man is tested with fire, and their workmanship revealed. Dr. King has demonstrated for us all a man committed despite any obstacle to truth, to justice, and to the rightness of life that must accompany any true profession of Christian doctrine, whether or not that profession approach the eloquence of his oratory.

The man himself put it best, two months before his 39th and final birthday, in a sermon to Ebenezer Baptist Church, the very place of his own birth and baptism, and his final resting place today:

Somehow you go on and say "I know that the God that I worship is able to deliver me, but if not, I'm going on anyhow, I'm going to stand up for it anyway." What does this mean? It means, in the final analysis, you do right not to avoid hell. If you're doing right merely to keep from going to something that traditional theology has called hell then you aren't* doing right. If you do right merely to go to a condition that theologians have called heaven, you aren't doing right. If you are doing right to avoid pain and to achieve happiness and pleasure then you aren't doing right. Ultimately you must do right because it's right to do right. And you got to say "But if not." You must love ultimately because it's lovely to love. You must be just because it's right to be just. You must be honest because it's right to be honest. This is what this text is saying more than anything else. And finally, you must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause--and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you're afraid that you will lose your job, or you're afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.

Some Sources:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23924.Martin_Luther_King_Jr_

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/books/26colvin.html?_r=1&hp

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coretta_Scott_King#House_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation

http://notoriousbiggins.blogspot.com/2010/01/but-if-not-sermon-by-martin-luther-king.html

Happy Christmas

Love.

Read no further if you are looking for a thought to meditate on today, for that is the truest spirit of the day. This truth dawned upon me as our last minute and sometimes bashful exchange of gifts (or gift IOUs) really started to sink in.

Those numerous moments when I realized how deeply thoughtful a small gift can be—out of the 130M or so books in the world, the one that is the perfectly captures my interest, and also shows your support and interest in a hair-brained movie idea that we've batted around for a couple years now... The prototype (sketch model?) of the perfect way to capture the business-idea-of-the-day that really needs to be drawn in order to be understood, captured, or shared—these moments cemented in my mind the real reason that we wander midtown at rush hour, in a eerily sweltering downpour, two days before Christmas, to hunt down that certain something that we know will bring a smile to the

ones

we

love.


Perhaps owing to some insecurity about the increasingly multicultural and, of course, commercial nature of this time of year, I have noticed many comments over the past month promoting (insisting on?) the recognition of the "Reason for the Season," usually meaning in some direct or indirect way: Jesus. This is, at one time, correct and incorrect.

Stick with me through the more negative comments, and I'll do my best to reward your patience...

Yes, tradition dictates that this day marks His birth, the point in time he entered human history as a tiny child, too poor for adequate housing or medical care, and utterly powerless to proclaim the mystery of His own incarnation to the crowd of humans and cattle in attendance.

Wonderful as the nativity is, it almost certainly did not happen on December 25 (no one would embark on a long journey in winter, as Joseph and Mary and the rest of the empire did for the census. A spring date is much more likely...). Most likely the choice of date comes out of a desire to market Christianity in a way that was more inclusive, a way that meshed with the folk religions of the masses.

But that is not what I celebrate. The memorialization of divine history shrouds deep and mysterious truths in trite trivializations and the huge pile of trash that is our expired collective efforts at marketing Christmas™ to the consumer.

Among other well intentions, the "Reason..." messaging attempts to counterbalance these consumer oriented appropriations with something a little more meaningful. Something, perhaps, that undoes the sense of damage or loss felt by the insistent erosion of the original brand. Marketing vs. marketing.

I can't accept this battle for the hearts and minds of the mob—Jesus has never fit well into the kind of broadcast culture that holiday traditions are supposed to reinforce. Jesus, the small, poor, Nazarene (middle eastern) infant crying in the night is difficult to fully comprehend as "th' incarnate deity" of Wesley's hymn without accepting both infant and deity as a deeply personal revelation. This is the core truth at the very heart of the Christian message:

The God who comes near.

There we find the other side of of the coin. By rejecting the "better not pout, better not cry" model of Christmas, we make room in our hearts for the Newborn King, who even though we do nothing to make ourselves worthy of it, comes near.

We too can strive to be near, to the child in the neighbor, and to the neighbors that he taught us to love. As impossible as it may seem, we can choose to forgive those who have rightly earned our scorn. We can choose to care for those who are not our problem per se, but who nonetheless need someone to care. We can choose to pursue peace through our honesty, patience, and self sacrifice.

We can choose love.

And when we tear back the paper that decorates the precious gift of our love for one another, we will feel that sense of comfort and joy that can only come from the reason for the season.

Love.

Graduate Degrees and the American Workforce

So apparently this is what I do on the first Friday night that I don't have to work late, and when there is no leftover turkey to distract me.

Somehow I got started down this path of trying to figure out how many people have the level of educational attainment that a growing number of our friends have (and that Lisa is working toward now). Like most idle curiosities of mine, this led to an elaborate spreadsheet and a completely amateur attempt at exploratory data analysis. Fun.

Why again did I decide to spend so many weekend hours in Excel?
Oh that's right, because the Minecraft server is down,
and Josh has finals, so I didn't want to bother him...
Don't judge...

According to NCES Data there have been around 16.7M Masters degrees awarded in the US since 1976, and another 4.5M or so Doctoral degrees (includes medicine and law degrees among many others.) 1976 is almost 40 years ago, so assuming that most grad students don't finish before age 25 (any ideas on where to get that particular data point?), these are substantially all of the graduate degrees that are currently in the workforce (or at least around 90-95% of them, but we'll just call that all of them for the sake of getting to bed at a decent hour)(maybe).

This means that the 200M or so Americans that have a job or are looking for a job hold about 21M advanced degrees between them. The US Census says that as of 2014, 10.4% of Americans over 18 have a graduate degree, just under 25M people.

Sadly, there are just under 1M Americans over 18
with no formal education whatsoever,
and another 2.5-3M (like my dad)
who dropped out of middle school.
29.5M Americans (about 1 in 8)
have not finished High School.

That 25M people includes the 5.1M people over 65 who are still alive and have graduate degrees, but are most likely retired from the workforce, and most likely got their degree before 1976. That makes around 21M degrees for just under 20M Americans, not all of which are in the workforce, let alone employed (I'm looking at you Mr. Had-to-get-a-PhD-in-Anthropology), but the market is certainly kinder to this 20M than it is to the 30M that don't have a HS diploma...

This well circulated BLS chart shows the harsh reality of the market's
heavy preference for the educated worker bee

That's not a great reason to go to grad school, which is not unlike a twisted sleep deprivation study where you expected to get along with your hyper-ambitious colleagues with extra credit for quantifying the age-adjusted growth rate of your tears-to-caffeine ratio. But I digress.

If after you have carefully considered the implications of your terrible life choice, you do decide to purchase some post-postsecondary education, you may be comforted to know that you will be joining a relatively small portion of Americans who share your poor judgement.

Maybe.

This impulse to tie educational outcomes to economic ones in this way (however fraught) is more and more fashionable.

Put simply, degrees from some disciplines pay more than
others—although the selectivity of the institution also helps...

There is a strong argument to be made for the merits of higher education beyond the ugly capitalist pragmatism that drives so many decisions: from the policies and strategies of large universities, to the choice of which school to attend, or which degree (or even which electives) to pursue.

Note also the largest groups by far: Education (i.e. Teachers, most of whom need an M.A.
in order to stand for credentialing exams, and Business—i.e. that increasingly ubiquitous M.B.A.
Who in their right mind wants and M.B.A. anyway.....

It's an interesting coincidence that the most popular categories by far are Education and Business, which together make up about half of all Masters degrees in the workforce. These two seem inextricably interdependent with each other and with the whole project of civilization: the development of young minds into a meaningful and informed citizenship, and the effective management of the resources and outputs of that citizenry.

You may disagree, but to me these two partners in the evolution of society seem to have lost their balance, since someone with an MA in Education would rarely expect to make as much as one with an MBA, but I suppose that is a topic for another day.

I'll close here with some relevant writing from the early 20th century education reformer John Dewey:

“The purpose of education has always been to every one, in essence, the same—to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society. This was the purpose of the education given to a little aboriginal in the Australian bush before the coming of the white man. It was the purpose of the education of youth in the golden age of Athens. It is the purpose of education today, whether this education goes on in a one-room school in the mountains of Tennessee or in the most advanced, progressive school in a radical community. But to develop into a member of society in the Australian bush had nothing in common with developing into a member of society in ancient Greece, and still less with what is needed today. Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.”

Those Troublemakers with their Funny Looking Hats

A small group of refugees got a little too excited that they had finally figured out how to make food grow out of the abundant but temperamental New England soil. They fired their muskets into the air (because of course they brought muskets, and who wouldn't want to fire off a few rounds in celebration—though they called it the more polite sounding "exercising [their] arms")

The local government thought they might be making trouble, so a group of about 90 armed men headed down to the refugee encampment, expecting a fight, but hoping to maintain the peace that their leader had negotiated with their new neighbors.

When they arrived, they found the white men 'feasting' on the small birds they had been hunting, and on the corn that they had learned to grow from Tisquantum (also called "Squanto," who learned English after he had been captured and enslaved by British "explorers" as a child, but that is another long story).

Ousamequin (better known by his title, Massasoit, which means Great Sachem), having on other occasions saved the white men from disaster, took pity on their humble feast, and ordered his men to bring from the Wampanoag families and petty sachems an offering for the celebration, and for three days they held their feast together.

Years later, Abraham Lincoln (known, like every US president, as the 'Great Father' to First Nations people) would reflect on the fact that despite the chaos of a crippling civil war, at least he could be grateful for the fact that no European power had tried to exploit the spreading weakness of the American experiment.

Knowing that history would one day become tradition and culture, Lincoln declared that on the last Thursday in November, the entire nation should take a break to give thanks to God for the peace, the providence, and the prosperity that our nation enjoys, even in the most difficult of times.

On this day of plenty, I pray that you and your family can enjoy the generous hospitality of a Great Sachem, and the gratitude and wisdom of a Great Father.

Happy Thanksgiving

Far Above our Poor Power...

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

The Midnight Ride of a Young Law Student

Riding on horseback on his way back to the university where he was studying law, a young man born on this day in 1483 was caught in a violent thunderstorm, and promised his chosen saint that if he survived he would become a monk.

Years earlier, he had dropped out of school at the age of 14, and since he had a very good singing voice, would typically sing in the streets for bread. With the help of a benefactor, and the sacrifices of his parents, he was able to return to school and achieved three degrees before entering law school. It was understandable, then, that his parents did not approve of his decision to abandon the life they had planned for him and devote himself to God.

As a young man who was now shut in to a monastery, he struggled greatly with his sinful nature, and tried numerous rituals to cleanse his guilty conscious, from the mundane (confession, penance) to the extreme (like flagellation, where a person whips themselves as hard as they can, and other forms of 'mortification' popular in that time and place, like spending the night in the snow with no blanket... Crazy, right?).

Still, nothing the young benedictine could do would set his conscience right, and as obsessed as he became with ensuring his own salvation, he only seemed more and more crazy, and eventually his mentors conspired to get him out of the monastery and to focus his mind on others.

He was sent with only a clerk's education to become "Doctor of Bible" (that is, the Dean of Religious Studies) at a nearby university that had only recently been founded. It took a few years, and a few more degrees, but eventually the monk earned his title as Doctor of Theology, and joined the Senate and Theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg.

It was here, finally, at the age of 35, after many years of having failed to ease his conscience and earn the piece of mind that comes with salvation, after years of deep study, and after years of watching the religious leaders of his time make promises that donations to the church were the surest way to ensure salvation (this last offense unsettled him more than anything else he had experienced), Martin Luther finally decided he would take the dangerous step of protesting the powerful and prevailing authority of his day.

He began rather quietly, by sharing with his bishop his 95 arguments from the bible against the church that he had served and would now oppose. The core of the argument:

Facit hec licentiosa veniarum predicatio, ut nec reverentiam Pape facile sit etiam doctis viris redimere a calumniis aut certe argutis questionibus laicorum. 

It is no easy task even for a learned man to defened the Pope from slander, or even from the 'shrewd questionings of the laity'.

And

Hec scrupulosissima laicorum argumenta sola potestate compescere nec reddita ratione diluere, Est ecclesiam et Papam hostibus ridendos exponere et infelices christianos facere.

To use force alone, and not give reasons, as a response to such arguments from the laity, is to expose the Church and the Pope to scorn, and to make all Christians unhappy.

To us, these may seem fairly polite, but to the bishop, and to his Pope, they were the greatest threat possible to the very core of their life's work. Thus, they did not respond politely, and rather than be silenced, Martin Luther chose to take his cause to the people, by posting his argument to his church facebook page, which at the time was hosted on the doors of the cathedral.

Perhaps this is why so many today write open letters and nail them to the doors of their own little forum?

Heresy and History are hard to disentangle. Radical and Rebel are just one sides labels for the other side's champions of principle.

Happy Birthday Martin. Here's hoping you were right...

The World will not Discourage you from Operating on your Default Settings

This gem by David Foster Wallace was read at church today, and it was fire. It is so moving to the tragic folly of giving ourselves in worship to literal God-less-ness...

"Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship...is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. 

If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. 

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. 

On one level, we all know this stuff already—it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. 

Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. 

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. 

They are default settings. 

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. 

And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. 

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. 

The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms. 

Alone at the centre of all creation."

(From a commencement speech delivered by Wallace in 2005)