Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts gave a speech at his ninth-grade son’s graduation, and it’s been receiving rave reviews across the land.
It really is a good speech, and you can watch it in the video embedded below, and you can read the transcript here.
But, ever since I heard about it last week, something has been bothering me. His son’s school is an exclusive one (its six week summer session alone costs $9,000) and, I suppose, many students whose families can afford that kind of money might need to hear this message:
I just wish some of the fawning media coverage of the speech made a mention of the fact the majority of students attending public schools in the United States live in poverty, and I think they need less unfairness and bad luck in their lives.
It would have been nice, too, I think, if Chief Justice Roberts has made at least a small allusion to that reality.
But maybe I’m over-reacting. Let me know what you think.
But I’m still not adding it to The Best Commencement Speeches.
I took his speech to be directed at those in front of him specifically. He points out their privileged lives and even says that if they were not privileged before attending this school, they are now since they had the opportunity to be there. He seems to wish the unfairness, the challenges, the bad luck, the strife, the events/moments that bring one down from their comfortable crystal towers that are taken for granted with such privileged upbringings so that they may better understand the world, to use their advantages to help others less fortunate to excell. To better the world because they experienced it from a newer, dim perspective and appreciate that they could have easily been in anothers shoes.
I maybe don’t grasp your concern as it relates to this regarding the public school children poverity rate. I totally agree with your message, and I beleive that message is a whole lot more important than the one made in speech. I am confused because the way it was addressed meant it was only focusing on the private graduating class and not made to be applied across the private-public boundary lines. It wasn’t saying that the high percentage of public students in poverty were treated fair or had good luck or that it even was meant to literally mean that they were not treated unfair and didn’t have bad luck, I simply think it wasn’t a speech addressing that other side at all. It seems that it literally only was spoken to the audience of the specific graduates that day. By saying what he said, personally I feel that he managed to give credence to the meaningfulness of recognizing other’s struggles while simultaneously merging the message to be charitable, appreciative, giving, and humble etc that would have had eyes rolling and yawns aplenty should it have been the cliche, standard wordings.
Not enough has been said for the struggling, impoverished social classes and obviously that means not enough has been done to help either. I can only hope that those students to whom the speech was given to, are able to read into it what I did, take away from it what I did and be affected by the meaning subtly laced into the words spoken because in its own, nearly invisible way, it was pointing out the message you wanted, it was calling attention to the poverty stricken public schools in its own way by making it impossible to not compare their lucky lives to those whom they are being “wished” to tumble down to their level. It wasn’t the worst speech (especially these days) and I can’t vouch for any qualifying as “best” but I can say that if what I’m hearing from it is the message meant to be heard, it’s a damn nice change from the last speeches I’ve had the misfortune to hear or read. He may not cite percentages and spout facts regarding the unfairness and disheveled state of the impoverished, he may not lecture the point in black and white, clear straight to the core of it, but he managed to possibly have the humanity instilled deeper into that class’s heart and very being without them even quite grasping the overwhelming meaning of it yet. But it could grow silently now that it has been planted subconsciously and it could very well have positive profound effects one day…even if the Cheif Justice didn’t mean a word of it.