President McGuire's Remarks for the Senior Luncheon: Blue Class of 2005

May 20, 2005

Senior Luncheon is a time to reminisce, to think of how much richer we all are because you have been part of our lives. We have learned so much from you --- Danielle, such an elegant presence as class president; Ria, our great orator and student government leader; Rewa, an exemplar for Trinity women’s leadership in so many ways; India, such a hard-working scholar; Philonda and Emily, resident assistants extraordinaire; Keisha, a great friend to all; Angelica, who really showed us all how soccer should be played; Ann and Sophia, investigative journalists; Yvonne, sports superstar; Lilly, your courage and determination; Brina, our poster woman for that certain Trinity style; Liz, may your passion for good causes never wane; Maria, our best cheerleader ever, insatiable in your desire to be there, to soak it in and squeeze out every single drop of your Trinity days.

We will miss you, as a class, and each of you in your own special way.

We hope you will miss us. We pray that the years will multiply your fond memories of us, subtracting any memory of the necessary tussles and arguments and debates that are part of our human community.

We’ve had just a few of those, haven’t we?

We call our colleges alma mater, dear mother, for a reason. Alma mater cares a lot about you, worries about you, tries to protect you from harm, wants to help you to grow and develop, tries to discipline you when you wander from good choices, sets a table for you spread with the most wonderful menu of intellectual tastes imaginable, entices you to try new things, prays that you will adopt good habits that last for life. Like any mother, alma mater views the moment of parting for your new lives with some trepidation, with pride for what you will be able to do as a result of your studies here, but with at least a small measure of concern that you not forget the lessons she tried to teach you.

And, also like any good mother, alma mater expects you to come home once in a while to let her know how you’re doing, so that she can look you in the eye and measure your growth and success in person. You’ll get many invitations from Trinity as you enter your new lives as our alumnae. Please accept some of them. Please come back, please write, please stay in touch. We and you are sisters for life, now, and we are family forever.

Throughout this weekend, you will be hearing messages about the lessons you have learned here at Trinity, and the ways in which you will carry those lessons and messages forth into the world you will inhabit, shape and lead for generations to come.

It is inevitable that these messages will include references to September 11, since, metaphorically at least, the Class of 2005 were just starting their college days when that terrible Tuesday dawned four years ago. (I say “metaphorically” because I know that many of you, like more than half of all college students in this nation, do not fit into the traditional four-year cadence of college life, and many if not most of you were certainly mature, experienced adults long before your started your higher education here at Trinity. But symbolically, for the sake of rhetoric, the Class of 2005 will be characterized as the students who were freshmen when this era in our national and world history began.)

September 11 is no longer just a date, or even just a reference to a great tragedy. No, September 11 is a cultural phenomenon, a habit of mind, a force for national policy, a line of demarcation between one world view and another.

In so many ways – in ways you may not even think about --- the consequences of September 11 have shaped your college years, and will continue to shape the global village we inhabit for a long time. You are the first class in 30 years, since the fall of Saigon in 1975, to have lived virtually all of your college years in a time when this nation has been at war, as a result of that fateful day. Civilization itself was terribly diminished on September 11, and we will deal with that consequence for generations.

I’ve been thinking about the world into which you will march with pomp and circumstance this weekend, and the challenges before you to be effective citizens and compassionate, visionary, hopeful leaders in the days to come as you put your Trinity education to the test of real life.

Two scenes from the last few weeks keep coming back to me, scenes that seem to bracket the choices we have before us quite well. One is an image that I heard about but did not see personally. Another is my own eyewitness memory.

In the first image, formed from what I’ve been told, I see a small, slight, white-haired woman walking along a lonely road in the Amazon jungle. Her name is Dorothy, a Sister of Notre Dame whose ministry has been in Brazil, in the Amazon, among the indigenous peoples whose lives and cultures are disappearing in the crush of modern development that includes cutting down the rainforest to make way for split levels and roads and parking lots for all those SUVs.

I see Dorothy walking purposefully under that great green canopy, even as she sees up ahead some men with guns drawn. She doesn’t turn around and run. She continues walking, undeterred, determined. I see her later on that lonely road, lying alone for hours, face down in the mud, pouring rain creating a river carrying away the blood from the multiple gunshot wounds. Dorothy Stang was murdered because she opposed the logging interests that are destroying the Amazon region, its people, its culture, its environment, which is a keystone environment giving clean air to the entire planet. She died because she was a nuisance, a gadfly, a person in the way of the chainsaws. They took her out so that they could take down the trees without having their consciences troubled by the wisdom, the courage, the righteousness of that little nun with a big heart and powerful voice.

In the second image, what I beheld personally, I see thousands and thousands of people in bright noon sunlight, most dressed in business attire, high heels and rep ties, suddenly torn from their power lunches, running away from the U.S. Capitol on a bright sunny day; self-importantly yelling on cell phones or waving their BlackBerries as they cascade across the well-manicured lawns of Capitol Hill, running scared from the rumor of a very small plane flying off-course somewhere in the 2,000 square mile area of what the security powers-that-be have declared to be the “no fly zone.”

There’s no “no fly zone” in the Amazon jungle. There’s no “no shoot zone.” There is a killing zone, especially for pesky nuns determined to live the Gospel. There was no alarm, no F-16 fighter jets, no mounted police on that lonely road in the rainforest to warn Sr. Dorothy Stang to turn around and run away from the danger that lurked to take her life. She knew she was in danger. She didn’t run away. She stood her ground for what she believed was right.

For hours and days after the false alarm in Washington, the episode blazed across the airwaves and front pages, all of the finger-pointing and what-if’s and breathless stories from the “survivors” of this event that was definitely not even a minor tragedy --- not one person was even injured, from what anyone could tell (there were some BlackBerry outages, of course, but that might almost be counted as a blessing). But that sadly misguided pilot from Lancaster will feel the full weight of our need to “bring ‘em to justice” if only for flying with a map half his age. And some poor fellow in the D.C. Office of Emergency Preparedness has surely been reprimanded for disconnecting the speakerphone that was supposed to keep all the high officials in the loop. (Imagine! --- four years after 9/11, a telephone with a detachable landline is the slim lifeline for D.C. emergency preparedness!)

In so many ways, the incident revealed contemporary America’s narcissistic preoccupation with vague threats and imagined dangers and deeply rooted need for security above all else.

Dorothy Stang didn’t need any speakerphones or BlackBerries or to tell her that she was in danger that day. She knew it. She kept going about her business.

I used the word “narcissistic” a paragraph ago. The dictionary tells us that the word means “an obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of others.” Since September 11, Americans have become pretty narcissistic on the topic of terrorism. Is this fair for me to say? Yes --- September 11 was terrible, and yes, we need to protect our nation from further attack. But in our obsession with that one day, we have blocked from our minds any awareness that the horror we felt on September 11 is lived continuously in places all over the earth, in acts of terrorism in Jerusalem and Baghdad and Belfast and Rwanda and Uzbekistan and Indonesia, in the violence and oppression that are the daily lives of millions of people on this planet; in the fatal peril that lurks on the lonely back roads of the Amazon jungle, where one woman walked alone --- purposefully, intentionally, courageously --- into the most awful heart of darkness imaginable.

These stories – deliberate extremes --- bracket the range of choices that you will most certainly face in the years ahead --- choices where you will have to decide whether to run for cover, or to stand strong and persist in your commitments. While, I hope, never so dramatic as these circumstances, you will face choices of considerable social, political, economic and spiritual importance for you, your families, your communities and nation. Time and again, the powerful lessons of your Trinity education will be put to the test as you try to discern the best option, the right choice for action amid confusion, doubt and danger.

You will have numerous opportunities to be citizen activists, community and corporate leaders taking stands and moving agendas on a wide variety of issues. Trinity graduates have done that for more than a century. One of the troubling legacies of September 11 is the way in which preoccupation with security has pushed to the margins the once-central agenda items of protection of civil rights, promotion of human rights worldwide, advocacy in favor of programs to serve the poor and disadvantaged citizens of the world, pursuit of justice and equality for all. Affordable health care, a secure retirement, true educational reform, fair and affordable housing programs, protection for the rights of workers, affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity, a clear and unambiguous national commitment to the eradication of racism, sexism, classism and other forms of invidious discrimination --- such were the items on the agenda of the New Deal, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, all now relegated to long-ago memories of the last century, disparaged by some as “liberal” ideas unsuited for contemporary America with its predominance of red states over blue.

In Reading Lolita in Teheran (2004: Random House), the author Azar Nafisi describes the unraveling of a once-open society into absolutism. Women who once walked freely in contemporary clothing suddenly are forced to cover-up completely, and morality squads roam the streets looking for stray hairs and nailpolish. Students gather surreptitiously in the apartment of their teacher to share the joys of reading great literature as secret, forbidden pleasures (I never thought of Pride and Prejudice as a tool of subversion!). Universities become shells of their former selves as academic freedom retrenches under the weight of the regime’s restrictions on what may be taught and said and written. A government official who is blind becomes the censor of theatre and television, with an aide dictating the scenes to him in advance screenings so that he can decide what the public may or may not see. (See pp. 24-25) The blind censor extinguishes the intellectual lights of the society one by one, imposing his judgment on what others may see and know and interpret for themselves, obscuring the light that is essential for discovering Truth.

The metaphor of the blind censor can be found in many layers of contemporary discourse about our social choices. The mythical blind censor would have us believe that concerns about equal opportunity and justice for all are, somehow, vaguely un-American in this day and age. The blind censor tells us that dissent gives comfort to the terrorists; that diversity of opinion and experience and perspective and culture and language is somehow divisive. The blind censor lies in wait to silence the Dorothy Stangs of the world, the pesky gadflies who are not afraid to speak the truth for the sake of justice, who refuse to run when they are told to get out of the danger zone.

Truth must prevail for justice to flourish. A Trinity education calls you to unmask the blind censor, to give voice to the Truth. That’s the profound moral choice you will face repeatedly throughout your lives. The call to action for the sake of justice is part of the heritage we receive from the Sisters of Notre Dame. Generations of Trinity graduates, the thousands of women who sat in this room for ten decades before you, heard this call and responded with intelligence and courage and great passion and luminous faith. They used the lessons they learned in their History and English and Biology and Economics and Sociology and Psychology classes, and all of their other curricula, to illuminate lives, to speak the truth, to work for justice and peace. They have taught children in places where few others would persist. They have built schools and AIDs clinics and pediatric centers and ministries for migrant farmworkers in locations that others thought hopeless. They have enacted legislation to protect uninsured children and care for the elderly and promote the rights of women. They have been the first voice of women ever heard in too many boardrooms and caucus rooms and committee chambers and executive suites. They have stood before the bar as advocates for justice for the disenfranchised and powerless. They have marched for civil rights and been arrested on behalf of human rights and prayed for peace without end. They have reported the truth from war zones. They have stood up in churches in Boston and challenged the hierarchy to tell the truth.

They have stood their ground, unafraid, determined, willing to risk much in the service to others, responding affirmatively and eagerly to the call to action for justice as a moral commitment, an article of faith.

And now, you, the great Blue Class of 2005, you go out to meet them, to stand along side your Trinity sisters in the great long chain of Trinity solidarity across the generations.

May the power and wisdom of this education give you the strength to choose wisely and courageously, to respond affirmatively to the call to action for justice, to stand your ground, always, with intelligence and integrity. May the light of your Trinity education illuminate all of the dark corners of this earth, giving voice to the voiceless, hope to those trapped in despair, knowledge to overcome the ignorance that fosters fear and oppression. May the friendships you made here keep you company down the pathways of your lives. May the memory of your teachers, your classmates and your days here at Trinity be sources of surprise and delight at the most unexpected times. May the knowledge and confidence you gained at Trinity mature into wisdom, serenity and fulfillment with the years.

May the blessings of the Trinity go with you as you take on the world, our great Blue Class of 2005!