We’re starting to resemble ominously our primitive forebearers, trusting no one outside the tribe.
They put us in contact with other tribe members, but rarely those who see things differently. Our various modern media lead us to, and feed us from information sources that reinforce our existing biases. People say things to and about each other that they would never say face to face, or maybe even think, if they knew each other personally. The so-called social media – I have come to think of it as “antisocial media” – enables and encourages hostility from the insulated enclave of a smartphone or a laptop. Including these memorable lines from his 2018 speech. Referring to such young people, someone has coined the distasteful but descriptive term “snowflakes.” At one large university, one “study” purported to find a quarter of the student body suffering from PTSD because of an election outcome. It, too, is still relevant:Īt other places, but I’m happy to say not yet at Purdue, students have demanded to be kept “safe” from speech, that is, mere words, that challenge or discomfit them. In 2019, he raised eyebrows for this in that pre-pandemic commencement speech. The speech President Daniels gave a few days ago on Purdue’s campus isn’t his first tour de force. Delivered last year during the height of the pandemic, it is timeless. Not to a college or university, but this short, memorable unsolicited speech via his Facebook page to trade school graduates and high school grads who forgo college for a trade. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame comes to mind. Oh, sure, there are other terrific commencement speakers.
Nor are they delivered in a flourishing style reminiscent of former Secretary of State and Harvard President Edward Everett, the other Gettysburg speaker in 1863, giving a speech for two hours that no one remembers. And not because his speeches are relatively short. There is no finer commencement speaker at any level than Purdue University’s President and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. Purdue University President Mitch Daniels warned that the pandemic snuffed out the American eagerness to take risks and move ahead boldly.