Valedictorian and Mouthpiece

It is a beautiful day here in northeast Indiana, quickly approaching the time of summer when you can watch the corn grow. I brewed an extra strong pot of coffee to kickstart my Friday, and the caffeine is kicking in as I walk through our backyard flower wonderland. As I walk, I cannot shake the words I heard from a valedictorian's speech.

Politics have no place in a high school commencement speech, unless those politics happen to agree with the people running the show.

I've sat through a lot of graduations over the years, and most commencement speeches follow the same well-worn formula. Every so often, though, one steps outside the lines. I recently watched the ceremony from my own high school alma mater, and the valedictorian spent a good portion of his time at the microphone going after the governor of Indiana and the Republican party by name, laying the state of public education at their feet.

I'll give him this much: I agreed with a fair amount of what he said, and I admire a young man willing to stand up with a conviction and say it out loud. His charge to his classmates, to get off the sidelines, get involved, and go make something change, was exactly the kind of call this laissez-faire generation needs to hear. That part I'll defend without hesitation.

But here's what I can't get past. At my niece's graduation last year, a different school, same state, a student was escorted out of the building for the crime of carrying a Palestinian flag. No words, no microphone, no audience held captive, just a flag. And hers isn't an isolated case. Every graduation season, somewhere, a student gets pulled out of a ceremony for a silent protest, a flag, a pin, a sash, while another stage somewhere else hands a microphone to a speech that goes after a sitting governor by name.

This was never really about politics having no place at graduation. It was the administration condoning politics that protected their own domain. That's not simple hypocrisy, hypocrisy at least implies they didn't notice the contradiction. This was amateurish political grandstanding, with a valedictorian handed the mouthpiece, even if every word out of his mouth was his own conviction and his own thought.

A flag never said a word. The microphone did. The difference wasn't whose voice was louder. It was whose voice the people in charge needed.