FREE SPEECH ZONE:

Anne Franklin Lamar

REMARKS FOR THE MUW 2009 MAGNOLIA CHAIN CEREMONY:

By Bridget Smith Pieschel, MUW Class of '79

May 9, 2009 - Good morning, MUW Class of 2009, from a member the Class of 1979! Take a breath and relax for a minute—YOUR 30th reunion year will be here shortly, and you owe yourself a brief time for reflection. You may not get another chance until you retire and start writing your memoirs. In a few hours you will scatter, leaving us and each other to inhabit a concluding paragraph in your chapter titled, “My Undergraduate Years at MUW: an Exposé.”

What will you remember fifty, sixty, seventy or even eighty years from now about your “nourishing mother,” the literal translation of, “alma mater”? Let’s look back for a few minutes. Does it seem to you as if you have been in a bubble of hellish academic schedules, roommate drama and vending machine suppers for four years?

Most of you began your college life in 2004. Historically speaking, it was the year of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “Costume Malfunction.” The summer Olympics were in Athens that year, after several tense weeks of terrorism fears. Lifestyle mogul Martha Stewart did her jail time for insider trading. Google went public that fall and made billionaires of the company’s founders. In March, ten bombs exploded on morning commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191, injuring more than 1,500. Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, and Yassir Arafat died. Over the Christmas holiday of your freshman year, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. By Feb. 2005, the death toll was more than 225,000 with thousands still missing.

In 2005 Condoleeza Rice was sworn in as Secretary of State, Sandra Day O’Conner retired from the Supreme Court, and Kuwaiti women were granted voting rights. Germany and Liberia elected women to lead their countries. Following the intervention of Congress, Terri Schiavo died thirteen days after her feeding tube was removed. At the beginning of your sophomore year, Hurricane Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast. Do you remember watching the east wind bending the trees down on campus as she moved through Lowndes County? Not only the physical landscape of our region, but also our psychological landscape took a terrible blow that August.

However, in January 2006, everyone was encouraged when the Dow Jones topped 11,000 points. It seemed to be a good omen. Later in the year, the Enron executives were convicted, and billionaire Warren Buffet announced that he had decided to donate 85% of his fortune to charity. The Dow Jones topped 12,000. Obviously buoyed by the positive economic news, the US population officially reached 300 million. And as violence and fatalities increased in Iraq, no one was surprised when Saddam Hussein was found guilty and was executed on the next to last day of 2006.

2007 was just as eventful. Nancy Pelosi was elected the first woman speaker of the House. President Bush announced his plan for a surge of additional US troops in Iraq. Harvard University named its first woman president. The stock market began its freefall, and in April a troubled student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. In July, J. K. Rowling published the seventh and final Harry Potter book while fans celebrated and mourned all over the world.

As 2007 ended and 2008 began, the US presidential campaign heated up, including a visit to our campus by Democratic candidate Barack Obama. 2008 closed with a presidential debate up in Oxford, and the historic election of the first African-American president.

In your final months as undergraduates you have been bombarded with hourly bleak reminders about the disintegrating world economy, and most recently, if the fiscal anxiety wasn’t enough to make you hide under your beds, you’ve been warned repeatedly about a worldwide swine flu epidemic. Are you sure you want to walk out the campus gates today? Let me tell you a truth that should comfort you: Things have ALWAYS been bad! Happiness and success have never been guaranteed; life is a scary gamble. You’ll be fine.

All of the news stories I mentioned are events, not ideas. They tell us what happened, not what was or is. Our curse and our blessing as human beings is our memory, but don’t assume that you will remember accurately or recall what you SHOULD recall. Otherwise, why can I vividly remember “The Amityville Horror,” the “Son of Sam” and John Wayne Gacy serial killer trials and the Jonestown Cult’s mass suicides, but NOT the minting of the first Susan B. Anthony dollar, the birth of the first test tube baby, or even Margaret Thatcher becoming the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom? ALL of these events happened during my senior year at the W!

When you return to campus after several years, your reunion will be not only with your friends, but with yourself. The memories will come back in bits and pieces. Suddenly, you will recall the campus trees blooming just before Spring Break, a roommate going at midnight to Walmart for cough medicine when you were sick in bed, the golden ginkgo leaves embellishing the sidewalk in front of Columbus Hall, a test you forgot about until it was time to take it, your hard drive crashing, taking your 20 page research paper with it, those high-fashion Zouave shorts, the spring musical, the bad joke your professor told over and over again, the tempting steam tunnels, the ghost stories you believed, Thursday night parties with a theme, a work and school schedule which allowed you about five minutes a week personal time. Who listened to you brag and complain? Who agreed with you to make you feel better? Who will remember you as you are now instead of as you will be seventy years from today? Look around you. The most precious part of your education is those who shared it with you. MUW alumna Eudora Welty explained this clearly: “It is our inward journey that leads us through time—forward or back, seldom in a straight line….Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember…when our separate journeys converge.” (One Writer’s Beginnings)

Selfishly, of course, all of us you leave behind hope you will recollect more than your professors’ bad jokes. What WILL you remember most about the teachers you loved and admired? I speak from experience when I tell you it is not what they said, but the passion with which they spoke, their seriousness of purpose, their certainty in their own correctness, their recognition of the best part of you, their praise for your smallest victory.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Plutarch said, "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Four hundred years ago “Shakespeare said, “There is no darkness but ignorance” (Twelfth Night). About forty years ago, in the novel Losing Battles, one of Eudora Welty’s characters said [with some guilt] that an influential teacher’s “dearest wish was to pass on the torch to me….What she taught me, I’d teach…and on it would go….She didn’t ever doubt that that all worth preserving is going to be preserved, and [that] all we had to do was keep it going….” (LB 236). What does that mean—to “keep it going”?

Upstairs in our campus’ Orr Chapel is a stained glass window given by a senior class long ago. From a high throne, a woman gazes straight ahead, her hand on a book in her lap. Below her is inscribed: “We study for light to bless with light.” The woman in the window is Sophia, the personification of Wisdom, and probably also of “alma mater.” Let me interject a comment: The phrase “listen to your mother” was never more appropriate than it is right now. The feminine depiction of Wisdom is part of an ancient tradition. The narrator of the book of Proverbs says, [Wisdom] is more precious than rubies…. Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand…are riches and honor.” He continues, saying [Wisdom calls] “to us on the heights beside the way, in the paths she takes her stand; beside the gates in the front of the town…she cries aloud: ‘Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right….I walk in the ways of righteousness, in the paths of justice’” (Proverbs 8:1-20, selected). Sophia says to us, “Your light that shines in the darkness is not a collection of facts, but illuminating and liberating thought--a lamp for your path.”

What does this mean for the future? To whom much is given, much is required. Our intellectual responsibility--our moral responsibility--is to speak out, using all our tools of logic and persuasion, when we see injustice. You are now different from the mass of humanity. While less fortunate people will struggle all of their lives merely to understand their personal difficulties, you have the breadth of knowledge to see and understand what is wrong with the larger picture. You have the vision of a braver world. Our education gives us the wisdom and the means to express outrage, to praise the worthy and to chastise the guilty. You have the knowledge and the voice. Don’t neglect to use them.

In “September 1, 1939,” the poet W. H. Auden describes our moral responsibilities, and the healing connection we have with each other:

 “Defenseless under the night 
Our world in stupor lies; 
Yet, dotted everywhere, 
Ironic points of light 
Flash out wherever the Just 
Exchange their messages: 
May I, composed like them 
Of Eros and of dust, 
Beleaguered by the same 
Negation and despair, 
Show an affirming flame.”

Does his challenge seem overwhelming in these perilous times? Not if you have studied for light to bless with light. As Solomon wrote, “[Wisdom] is the brightness of the everlasting light….she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars….For after [that light] comes night: but evil shall not prevail against Wisdom” (Wisdom 7:26-30). Keep her light burning. Thank you, Class of 2009.