Great Speech

I listened to this great speech by Josh Clark, the host of Stuff You Should Know. It's for the graduating class this year & I looked for the words but couldn't find them so I did my best to transcribe it myself and here it is: Dear Students, congratulations on reaching this point in your life. It's a big deal & you should be proud of yourself. Now that you've gotten here, I've come to fill you in on a little secret. You've been told practically your whole life now how special you are...& that is true. You are special. You are unique & you're important. But your parents & teachers haven't been telling you the whole truth all of your life. They've only been showing you a part of the bigger picture.

Surely you've noticed hints of this..like when you got older and suddenly the stories they told in history class began to get a lot darker. They told the same stories when you were younger. They just arranged the picture without ALL of the pieces to keep you from truly understanding and perhaps you resented it when you realized the whole truth had been kept from you. That's understandable. Most of us do feel that way. But don't waste your time stewing on this. Each generation does it to the next.

They think it protects the young when really, it just keeps things as they are. The important thing here is to learn from that experience because people are going to continue to do this to you your whole life. People will try to lay out the pieces that fit together to make the picture THEY want you to see. It's a way to get people to do what you want them to and throughout your life, you will get this from all sorts of people: people you're friends with, people you love, people on television, people on the internet, people running your government, people running other people's government. Your actions & your thoughts are powerful and influential and people want to sway them. This means that you will have to learn to think for yourself. Do your own research. Seek out people who are experts on the topic. Talk to other people. In this day & age, it's not enough to trust your eyes or ears. You have to put in work to find the truth.

Don't be lazy. Find the truth. It's not necessarily what's on the news. It's also not necessarily in some video that says the news is lying. Always remember this: whatever someone is showing you, they're probably only showing you part of the picture. It's up to you to fill in the rest of the pieces that make up the whole truth and maybe you'll never find it. That's okay. It will be exhausting to spend your life constantly searching for the truth, constantly paranoid that every person you speak to is manipulating you. Don't do that. That's not what life is about and people aren't that mean at their core. Most people don't even realize they're showing you an incomplete picture and usually they're not doing it for nefarious purposes when they do. Instead, the vast majority of people are just passing along an incomplete picture that someone else showed them.

This happens a lot. It's a big problem. So to keep from dying from exhaustion by age 30, all haggard and paranoid and upset, do two things. 1. Decide if something is important enough to you or the world to search out the missing pieces to find the truth of the matter. Sometimes all it takes is an effective google search and taking the time to read a couple of reliable articles. But remember that even if you do search high & low, you may never find the truth about whatever it is you're trying to understand so it better be important if you're going to go looking for the truth of a matter. 2. If it's not important, shrug it off. You will never know everything. You'll never know most things. Some things will be important enough for you to search for. Most will not be. If you decide it's not that important then, and this is really important, don't pass along the incomplete picture to others. When you do that, you're shaping someone else's view of things. They trust you. They know you're a good person with the good of the world at heart so why would you lie? Throughout your life, people will listen to what comes out of your mouth so be careful that you believe in what you say. Back to what I was saying before about your parents and teachers giving you an incomplete picture. I hope you understand a little better now that they don't mean any harm by it. They might think they were protecting you all these years by keeping ugly truths from you. But those ugly truths, as hard as they can be to take, are what allow us to grow as people. If you see a beautiful flower, you admire it and are glad that it's there. If you see a weed growing though, you pull it but if the people around you are telling you that the weed you're seeing is actually a flower, it's hard to know otherwise and it's even harder to know that the weed should be pulled.

Remember that your parents and teachers weren't lying to you because they wanted to deceive you. Their parents and their teachers showed them pictures of weeds that grow in our world and told them that they were flowers, too.

And their parents' parents and their teachers' teachers told them. Some weeds have been called flowers for so long that no matter what you say to some people, they will fight you tooth & nail that the weed is a flower.

That's their truth and people are deeply protective of what they hold to be true, even when it's not true at all. Part of the reason they'll fight and argue with you when you tell them a flower is actually a weed is just simple laziness. It takes a lot more effort to pull a weed than it does to pretend it's a flower. But the bigger reason they'll argue is because they don't want to believe they've been wrong all this time. The thing is no matter how long everyone's called a weed a flower, there's some aspects to a weed that a flower doesn't have that will always give a weed away, like hurting people. If something that people you know say is a flower harms other people, it's really a weed. Weeds can hurt people in all kinds of ways.

Maybe they give rights to some people but not to others. Maybe they make it so some people have more wealth or power than they could ever possibly use while some people have so little they can barely scrape by. Other weeds may get so that when some people hurt other people, or other life or the planet, they don't get in trouble for it. If you suspect a flower is really a weed and you look at it closely enough, you'll see that the people who say it's a flower are the ones who get all the benefits from it. You'll also find there's a whole other group of people out there who've been calling it a weed all this time.

It's just that nobody's listened to them and sometimes it's even worse than that. Sometimes those people are told that their own flowers are weeds. So what does all of this have to do with you being special and unique? Excellent question and actually, that's the whole point of everything. It's not a lie that you are special & unique. You are both of those things. But not simply because you're you as you've been led to believe all these years. That's an incomplete picture of the whole truth. You are special and unique because you are born a human being. All human beings are special & unique, not just as individuals but the whole human race. Every one of us is special. Every one of us is unique and the same goes not just for human beings but for all living things.

Life is special and in this way, every single person that you will ever meet in your entire life is as valuable and worthwhile as you are. Some of these other people that you'll meet will disagree with you and some of them may harm you. Just because a person is unique & special, doesn't mean they're good. But as hard as it can be to remember sometimes, never forget that on the whole, human beings are generally good. They generally care about each other. They generally want what's best and most just. Don't forget that humanity is generally good. It's just that sometimes other people don't recognize a flower as really a weed.