A Generation Rises

This is the keynote speech I gave at the Florida Scholastic Press Association. Thursday, April 12, 2018 in Orlando, FL.  The theme of the convention was “Emerge, Expand, Evolve.” I've edited it slightly.

It’s great being back in Florida. It’s been almost 96 hours since I was here last. I spent last week with kids and grandkids somewhere near Panama City Beach. It was spring break, so there were hundreds of thousands of teenagers hanging out and riding bikes in various stages of nudity. 

I must admit, it was interesting. Kind of like watching one of those National Geographic documentaries about the mating rituals of prairie chickens, if prairie chickens wore short shorts and spiked their hair and flashed a lot of midriff.

Anyway, it’s great to be back in Florida after all this time.

Let me tell you why I get hired to do gigs like this: Because I’m old and I’ve been around a while, and I tell entertaining stories about all the times everything went straight to Hell. 

Like the time a girl attending our summer journalism workshop turned up missing after curfew, and we feared the worse, but, as it ended up, she just sitting in the front seat of a car, parked right in front of the dormitory — making out with a coach from the basketball camp.

These stories are supposed to serve some noble purpose, like teaching best practices and offering sage advice but more often than not, they just scare the hell out of young advisers, who should know by now that when you’re working with teenagers, every day is anything can happen day.

So, here goes: A funny story with a poignant lesson.

I was a teenager once myself. When I was 16 or 17, I drove my car through the plate glass window of Paul’s Grill in Longview, Texas at 2 a.m.

My dad was out of town, and my mom worked nights as a nurse. I had a part-time job stocking shelves and bagging groceries at a local supermarket, so, by the time I got home, around 10:30, she’d left to go to work. 

I called her and told her I was home and was going to bed and that I’d see her in the morning, and then I hopped in my car and picked up some pals, and we played mailbox baseball in addition to committing some other mindless mischief.

Around 1 a.m., I pulled into Paul’s Grill — a typical all-night coffee shop —  for a bite, and somehow, when I got back in the car to leave, something happened, and, long story short, my car lurched forward and smashed through the plate glass window, knocking some old guy out of a booth and sending waitresses screaming and coffee flying in every direction.

By the way, I was sober, and I won’t get into my theories of how this happened, but after dealing with the police — who found this all unimaginably humorous — I had to go Good Shepherd Hospital to inform my mom that mistakes had been made but it was too early to begin assigning blame. 

“It’s not that bad,” I told her, which meant, “No one died,” and I think I added something like, “One day, we’ll look back on all of this and chuckle.”

Mom didn’t chuckle. The next morning on her way home, she drove past Paul’s Grill to find half the building boarded up.

Of course, I don’t sleep a wink because I knew what was about to happen, and it did.  When she got home, she put me through the wringer.

At some point in the interrogation, she asked me the following question: “Why do you lie to me?”

Well, there’s no answer to that question, so I decided to tell a joke. I thought it might break the tension. Lighten the mood. Introduce a modicum of levity in what had become an unnecessarily contentious encounter.

So, I said to my mother, “Well, as you know, there’s a sign on the side of the building that says, ‘Drive Thru Window.’  So, I did. 

I thought she was going to slap me through the wall. I could see in her exhausted, exasperated eyes a look that bellowed, “I should have killed you in the cradle.”

Years later, my brothers and I were reminiscing about that night with my mom sitting right there with us, and I thought, “Well, surely by now, she sees the humor in it.”

She didn’t. Same look. Should have killed you in the cradle.

So, what have we learned from this little story? Don’t be a smart-ass when you know you’re wrong, especially with your mother.

Somehow, I survived high school, went to college, graduated and landed a job at the University of Texas as the editor of a newsletter that was circulated to 31,000 public school teachers, coaches and administrators, and I wrote something along the lines of the following:

The Legislature is returning to town. Hide your mules and your daughters.

I thought it was clever.

Somehow, a copy of newsletter fell into the hands of someone in the university president’s office who promptly ordered all 31,000 copies of that newsletter to be hauled directly to a landfill. You see, the University depends upon the Legislature for its funding, and legislators have no sense of humor.

I was given a stern talking to, and this time, I didn’t try to weasel out of it. I said “yes sir” about 45 times, and they let me keep my job.

So, lesson learned: Always choose smart over clever. If smart isn’t an option, keep your damn mouth shut.

So, two good lessons, learned in, what, five, six minutes? I could tell more stories tonight, but I’ll save them for my sessions tomorrow because, well, I don’t want to waste this moment with goofy stories when I have something far more important — though not nearly as entertaining — to say. 

Here goes: 

I’m sorry.

I apologize.

I was wrong. 

I have been wrong about you and your generation. 

I underestimated you.           

Not only that, I mocked you and your skinny jeans and nose rings and your funny hats and tattoos and vaping and especially your 4-chord, 5-note, thump thump thump thump thump thump music.

Like a lot of other old Baby Boomers, we tabbed you as a generation of spoiled, entitled, lazy, clueless, socially-inept, verbally-challenged, politically-apathetic, celebrity-and-wealth obsessed know-nothings who wouldn’t look up from their iPhones even if warned they were about to step off a cliff into a vat of raging hot Spaghetti-O’s.

My generation has deemed all of you to be incomplete, diminished, sub-standard, throw-backs — with one exception, of course. Our own grandchildren, who are brilliant and perfect. The rest of you suck.

I’m as guilty of that as anyone here, and again, I apologize. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

For the past three or four years, I have spent portions of every workshop I’ve taught haranguing students to wake up, to educate themselves and to get involved because they’re about to inherit a mess. 

I’ve felt like something between one of those old guys who’s always screaming at the neighborhood kids to stay out of his yard and John the Baptist, out in the wilderness, preaching wildly to the wind and the rain and the sand.

Some kids seem to get it, but most, I thought, did not. They seemed more interested in the Kardashians than they were the fact that their schools, their communities, their nation and the world is falling apart.

But that was then, and this is now, and I am no longer disillusioned with your generation because you and others like you across the nation have awakened — and I want it understood, we did not wake you. You did this. You took the initiative. —  and you decided it was time to rise and meet challenges of the moment. You emerged. 

I am brokenhearted that it took what it did to stir you into action, to reveal to you the power you possess the power to alter the conversation, to confront the status quo, to begin demanding that something meaningful be done, and not tomorrow, and not next week, but now. But that’s what you’ve done. That’s what you’re doing. Right now. 

Look how much you’ve achieved already. It’s staggering. You’re on the cover of Time magazine this week. I’ve not seen anything like it since the heyday of the civil rights movement, and I was your age in the mi-1960s. 

I remember that it was young people then who marched, and protested, who got beaten up and murdered and fire-hosed and arrested, and in doing so they held up a mirror and forced all Americans to look at themselves and ask, “Is this really America? Is this really America the Beautiful?”

And now, 50 years later, it is young people again who are marching, who are forcing the country to search its soul and ask, “Is this the country we want to live in? Is this the new normal? Is this who we are?”

I don’t believe it is who we are, but here’s the bad news: Change may come, but it won’t come easy. It never does. The backlash has already begun. Entrenched elites never surrender their power and privilege and profits without a fight, and they fight to win, and they don’t always fight fair.

So, the struggle is likely to be long and difficult and frustrating and possibly brutal. But don’t give in. Don’t give up. Don’t settle. Don’t sell-out. 

We hear this all the time: You are the future of our nation. Well, that’s not true. You are the present.

Today, you are the soul of this country. 

You are the conscious of this country. 

You are on the right side of history, and that should give you strength, but that alone will not carry the day. 

Persistence carries the day. Steadfast commitment carries the day. Vision and focus carry the day.

So, don’t give in. Don’t settle. Don’t sell-out. Don’t wear-out. Don’t flake out. 

I’m talking to all of you. Yearbook, newspaper, magazine, online, offline, inline. I don’t care. Writers and reporters, photographers, graphic designers, broadcasters, bloggers, thinkers, boyfriends, girlfriends, all of you.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

•••

Don’t allow your readers and listeners to be sidetracked or hook-winked or flat-out lied to. Facts are facts. Real journalists seek the truth, and the truth is found in facts — not in alternative facts. Not in alternative narratives.

So, commit yourself to coverage that encourages your peers to understand and exercise their responsibilities as citizens.

Offer opportunities for open, honest, truthful dialogue. We don’t need heroes or super-heroes. We need informed, engaged citizens who are willing and able to confront the dire issues before us, and if you don’t know the issues, well, then, that’s your first task. Educate yourself.

For example, four out of 10 millennials don't know or aren't sure that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. How is this possible? What do you have to say about that? What does it say about the education you’re receiving?

How many of you have noticed what teachers in Kentucky and Oklahoma and other states are doing? They’re demanding change. How are you going to cover this? How are you going to lead the discussion about how and why this change should occur?

           

Recently, a young, bright Texas middle school teacher from Bastrop, Texas — a little town about 20 miles east of Austin, where I live — posted on Facebook her reason for leaving the classroom, and it’s gone viral. She wrote, “Parents have become too disrespectful, and their children are even worse. Administration always seems to err on the side of keeping the parent happy, which leaves me no way to do the job I was hired to do— teach kids. People absolutely have to stop coddling and enabling their children.”

How are you going to cover this? How are you going to lead the discussion of this issue?

Notice, I didn’t ask, “Are you.”  I know you will. This is your job. This must be your mission. You must be at the forefront, at the vanguard of this moment of change. You must look beyond the officially-sanctioned artificial soap opera that plays out every day in every school and find the truth of what it is to be a high school student today. You must raise awareness.

Why is this young teacher quitting? 

Why are school children still being massacred? 

What can we do? 

What must we do?

How do we make our school, our community, our nation a better place, a safer place, for all of us?

           

Furthermore, how do we give voice to those who feel they have no voice, no power, no recourse. How do we tell the stories of those who have been ignored or denigrated or deemed irrelevant because of their race or sexual preference or gender or class or haircut or whatever? How do we change their narratives?

As journalists, you can be the agent of that change, but you won't be until you understand that you can be.

•••

Dr. Martin Luther King certainly understood this. In 1968, in his “I have been to the mountain top speech,” Dr. King spoke of the Bill of Rights, particularly freedom of the press. This is what he said:

Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights. And so, just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

That’s what you have to do too. You have to go on. Emerge. Expand. Evolve.

•••

I’ve heard this so many times: “Enough is enough.”

Well, is it?

Is enough enough?

No. 

Enough is too much.

Once was too much.

Once more is...

No more.

You have to go on.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a backlash already against you. They have mocked you. They have called you defiant, ungrateful punks. Spoiled brats. Dupes and tools and patsies. They’ve posted despicable things about you on Facebook. You’ve seen them, right?

They have suggested that the answer to this problem is learning how to duck, learning CPR. They have suggested that the answer to this problem is arming your teachers or, short of that, providing each classroom with a bucket of rocks.  

OK, they might not be very bright, but, again, they’re not going to surrender without a fight. 

Well, so be it. Let's get it on. Enter the fray. 

You can prevail, and I believe you will prevail.

I don’t pretend to speak for every adult in this room, but I believe most of our eyes are now open and our hearts are full, and we are with you. We believe in you. You have given us reason to believe.

A month ago, I didn’t. But today, I do. I believe you will rise to the occasion, and you will not be remembered as Generation Ybother. Or Generation ZZZZZ. Or “the Millennial Lites.”

I believe you will be remembered as Generation P — the generation that woke up and stood up and declared “No more” and came together in the aftermath of senseless tragedy to save this country.