...graduation parties, ...…and my second commencement speech. I posted my first commencement speech last year around this time as my offering to graduates on some topics that might not have been covered by the keynote speakers at their commencement ceremonies. In case anybody's interested in reading (or re-reading) my last year's commencement speech, here's the link: http://www.ailantha.com/blog/my-commencement-speech Anyway, since then I've thought of a few more words of advice to young graduates to add to last year's; and so, as an addendum to my last year's commencement speech, here, young graduates, is my 2016 commencement speech to you: 1. Graduates, remember that any accomplishment that comes easily and without considerable effort or work is probably not worth much. Or, as master martial artist Bruce Lee once put it: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10, 000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times”. 2. When you've been sitting at a table and get up to leave, be sure to always push the chair back up against the table so no one else trips over the chair or bumps into it. This is especially important in restaurants where servers are trying to quickly maneuver around the room with armfuls of food. 3. Speaking of restaurants, be good tipper. Never leave less than 20%. Even if the service isn't great and they messed up your order. Most of the time the restaurant staff really is trying their best to please you, and, think about it, how rarely, if ever, have you been served in a restaurant by a server who wasn't friendly and cheerful? Remember: if you can afford to eat out, you can afford to leave a decent tip. If you can't afford to leave a decent tip, then stick to healthy fast food. 4. The guy or gal who delivers your pizza should also be tipped 20%. If you don't have enough for the tip, pick up the pizza yourself. 5. To figure out 20% you multiply the bill by two then divide it by 10. And round up. 6. What people refer to as common sense often turns out to be nonsense. Don’t latch onto easy-sounding truths because easy truths often aren’t true. The world is seldom black or white, ...and no matter how much you like or dislike somebody, nobody’s all good or all bad. (Or almost nobody). 7. Wrestle with ideas. Wrestle with angels. Wrestle with yourself. Don't mistake your own voice for the voice of God. (The two can sound deceptively alike). ...you can only control what you say or do. 10. Vote. Read the news and find out about the candidates. If you have the choice of two candidates and hate them both, choose the lesser of the two evils. The lesser of two evils is still better than the greater of two evils. 11. Having lots of good stuff doesn't mean you're blessed. 12. You don't have to like everybody. You don't have to be everybody's friend. But you should at least make the effort to to be civil and polite to everybody, even when it requires effort. 14. Unfortunately, the same is true of mean words. 15. So don't say everything you're thinking.
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I don't want to hear any more about the Gorilla Story.
You know, the story of the 3-year-old boy at the Cincinnati Zoo who somehow got into the gorilla enclosure, and I don't really want to go into the rest of it because you all know the story anyway, and really, I can't stand thinking about it. And so I want the story to go away. I want the news cycle to cycle on past it, leave it behind. And yet that's not happening. The story just won't go away. This morning at 8 am when I turned on the local radio station the Gorilla Story was still at the top of the news. It was on page two of the Metro section of today's Columbus Dispatch. And so once again, I had to watch this scene from a horror movie play out in my head, had to see in my technicolor imagination the whole awful thing, from the moment the little boy climbs under the enclosure to the moment the gorilla goes down. I want to stop watching this dreadful movie in my mind but I can't, because every time I hear or read about it in the news the movie reel starts rolling again behind my eyes. What makes it even worse is that sometimes the mother in the movie is me and sometimes the child who's being dragged around by the gorilla is my son when he was 3 years old. Sometimes it's one of my little granddaughters. So to all you animal rights activists I say: back off from the mother. She's already suffering the torments of the damned and she'll be blaming herself long after you let up reminding her what a terrible mother she is. To the Cincinnati police who are considering criminal charges against the child's mother: close the case. It's not necessary. She'll be punishing herself for the rest of her life, believe me. As for Harambe, the Gorilla. Yes it's sad that he had to be killed. Sad, too, I guess, that this behemoth who was created by God to roam the Western lowlands of Africa had to be bred and raised to live in a glorified cage in Cincinnati, Ohio to be stared at by people all day long. On the other hand, maybe Harambe's life was a happy enough one. Maybe even a happier one than he would have had in nature, who knows? And of course without zoos how would we humans have the opportunity to see and marvel at such natural wonders as gorillas? But the fact, I think, that we sometimes lose sight of - in truth, one that's never occurred to me before this terrible gorilla story - is that zoos are in fact full of monsters. Every zoo is a mini-Jurassic Park but instead of dinosaurs there are lions, tigers, grizzly bears, gorillas, chimpanzees, alligators, crocodiles and other terrors of nature that could tear a person apart as easily as a velociraptor or a T-Rex. And, as we unfortunately learned when a 3-year-old fell into the space of a 400-pound gorilla, Chaos Theory doesn't only play out in the movies. Dear Ms. Clinton,
Hello. I am applying for the job of your campaign speech writer, just in case you think maybe you could use a new one. Please find below a sample speech that I am submitting for your consideration. Sincerely, Patti Liszkay Hillary Clinton Campaign Speech, Op. No. 1 By Patti Liszkay I've vowed that one thing I would not let myself do during this campaign is dive down into the slop-heap next to Donald Trump and attempt to behave as swinishly as he does, no offense intended to swine, who I understand are in fact clean, well-behaved, useful animals. Even if I wanted to take on Donald in a sliming contest, I could no more win at that sort of game than could those of his Republican primary opponents who tried to sink to his level and failed at it. Donald is the master of slime. Unfortunately - no, I think I'll change that to fortunately - we the rest of us, Democrat and Republicans alike, were all too-well-brought-up to be as crass and crude as Donald grew up to be, for all his inherited wealth and privilege. Still, as Donald Trump has such a propensity for name-calling, it's been suggested that I should at least try and repay him in kind by thinking up a campaign nick-name for him. I heard that a radio station host in Columbus, Ohio invited listeners to call in with suggestions for nicknames that I might use on Donald, and to those Columbus listeners I say thank you, I do appreciate your efforts on my behalf. But in truth, if I were of a mind to go nasty-name-slinging, I could probably come up with a few on my own: Like Disreputable Donald. Disgraceful Donald? Disgusting Donald would probably work. How about Spoiled Donald? Not in the sense of over-pampered and ill-behaved, which Donald certainly is, but more in the sense of, you know, rancid, kind of like the good business investments that went bad and fell into bankruptcy under his inattentive and sloppy management. Or rather, mismanagement. But I think the name that would be just the ticket, that would really cover all the bases nicely, would be simply Dirty Donald. Dirty Donald. On mark and to the point. Dirty Donald. Fights dirty. Deals dirty. Dirty mouth. Dirty mind. Forget throwing rocks and bottles during his campaign rallies; what protesters really ought to be throwing at Donald are bars of soap. Get him to clean up his act. Then at the opposite end, the high end, of the decency spectrum is my colleague Bernie Sanders. Though we are opponents, Bernie, I will say that I consider you, I've always considered you, a good person, a decent human being whose heart is in the right place. In truth, Bernie, you and I, message-wise, policy-wise, we're very close. We may differ in our style, approach and modus operandi, but I believe that in our vision of what we'd hope to accomplish as President of the United States, we differ by mere degrees. But then there's this annoying little thing called reality. Having a bold vision is one thing, and it's a good thing. But bringing your vision to reality takes so much more hard work, it takes compromise, it takes mutual cooperation, it involves give and take, getting what you can in exchange for giving what you must. Senator Sanders, you always stood your ground in Congress. You crossed your arms and refused to vote for any bill, however beneficial it might have been for our country as a whole if it did not meet up to your standards to the letter. Much of the time you've stood alone, above the fray. This yields idealistic purity. What it doesn't yield is legislative effectiveness. It sends a message. But it hasn't gotten a whole lot done. As I've said before, I'm a progressive, but a progressive who likes to - and knows how to - get things done. As for me, I've been wrestling so hard and so long for the common good that I've developed muscles, scars and, subsequently, strength beyond belief. In my life, in my career in the United States Senate and as Secretary of State, have I made decisions that have over time, somewhere down the line have yielded unhappy outcomes? Yes. Of course. I won't deny that. But I've made many, many decisions, and people who make many decisions have to deal with the fact that the results of some of those decisions will be determined by circumstances that can't possibly be foreseen. One weighs the known facts, prays for guidance, then takes a course of action and prays for a good outcome. And I promise you that any decision I've ever made, any course of action I've ever mandated, has been with the best interests of our country in my heart. And yes, all right, I did use of my home server to send work emails while I was Secretary of State - say, can I just clarify something about that? Look, since the dawn of government use of the internet, every Secretary of State before me has used their personal computers to send work-related emails. Then sometime between when the previous Secretary of State was allowed to do it and when I started doing it, a government directive was issued prohibiting this practice it in the future. I have no idea when the directive was issued. But what I'm saying is, this rule prohibiting the use of personal email servers is not right up there with the original "thou shalt nots" - you know, like "thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not bear false witness"...but "thou, Secretary of State, shalt not use your own internet server" just doesn't date back all that far. Nor is it instinctive that I, as Secretary of State, should not have used my own server to send non-classified messages. As I said, in the past it was common practice for a Secretary of State to do this. And I'm sorry to say, I never got the memo that it was no longer okay. I can only say that I wish the Inspector General had come banging on my door to let me know that it wasn't allowed back when I was Secretary of State rather than waiting until years after I'd left that office when I just happen to be running for President. Which kind of begs the question: Inspector General, why didn't someone from your office inform me back then? Why wasn't our national security so important to you back then as it seems to be now? In any case, believe me, I now know not to use my personal computer for work emails. I know. Not gonna happen again. Believe me. My personal email will be strictly for communications within the scope of my personal life. And though it's been made very clear that my government communications must heretofore be kept altogether separate from my personal ones, my personal life is still, for some reason, considered fair game in the realm of my work life. And as I understand as well as anyone that this reality isn't going away any time soon, I might as well come out and say it now: Yes, I've stuck by my husband through good times and bad, sickness and health, and intend to continue doing so 'til death do us part. So shoot me. What's been done has been done, what been said has been said, so shoot me again if you must, but remember, I'm not the one who said, "Whatever God has joined together let no man put asunder." I didn't ordain those words. I simply choose to live by them. Because, shoot me as many times as you will, I am faithful and loyal and will always be. In the end, I have experienced - and endured - much in both my personal and public life. I've sat among world leaders and poor young single mothers, and yes, as Senator Sanders has pointed out a time or two, I've even given speeches to Wall Street investment bankers. Because that's what people of my world experience do. We share our accrued knowledge and insights with groups who are interested in what we have to say. And, like everyone else in the world, we get paid for our work. That's how the world works. But that doesn't change the fact that my heart is in public service. That's where my heart has always been, and it's what my life's work has always been and I pray will always be. And so, as I've asked you before, I will ask you again: let me continue to be your champion. Give me the opportunity to continue getting up everyday to work for you and to fight for you. Give me the opportunity and I promise you I will. I promise. (Say, does anybody happen to know how I get this to Hillary Clinton?) |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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