Walls
I've been thinking about borders recently. How could I not? I write often about boundaries and the need to push on them, trying to spread understanding, and about when boundaries are borders or limits, then people get hurt. And I heard some Frost the other evening:
Something there is that does not love a wall...
It is with this frame of mind that I attended Bloomfield College's 133rd Commencement on Thursday.
Pretty much, commencement exercises here are like commencement exercises everywhere else I have been: tedious affairs with students screaming, "We got a get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do" or the equivalent, teachers amazed that Student X actually managed to graduate or mumbling to each other, "That's a good one." The college chaplain leads a prayer at the beginning and then end, and in between are bits and pieces of speeches that one can never quite remember. For all the pomp and circumstance, they are some of the most unmemorable events one can ever attend.
Bloomfield does something differently than other places I have been. Instead of having some politician or other nationally- (or at least statewidely-) known celebrity of sorts give a commencement address, we confer honorary degrees on a selection of worthy individuals (nominated by anyone in the campus community and approved by the administration and board of trustees and the faculty), and these individuals have a short version of their story told (see here) and then have the opportunity to speak for 5-15 minutes to the assemblage. Since we are so near The City, the possibilities are always intriguing. This year's selection of 5 individuals (plus two who "couldn't make it": Mos' Def and Spike Lee), was larger than usual, but remarkable nonetheless: Geoffrey Holder, Carmen De Lavallade, Richard Pechter, Marilyn Pfaltz, and Rick Ufford-Chase. Every one of them talked about borders, about boundaries, about limits, at least in my head.
Mr. Holder began with what I remember best, "I am a dunce." He talked about growing up with dyslexia and the walls he encountered and difficulties he had, but balanced it with, "But when God closes one door, he opens another." And he spoke about how God created the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat, not because he had made mistakes, but because he enjoyed creating things. And so our students must also create things in their lives. And they must pass this along to their children. "Let the museums and art galleries be your children's playgrounds," he said. Mr. Holder is frail and had to be helped on to and off of the stage, but did manage about 5 seconds of soft shoe.
Carmen de Lavallade is all about borders. She has broken down borders wherever she has gone. She spoke about the limits we place on ourselves and how it takes a wider view to achieve our potential and how we must combine our knowledge from different areas to make new meaning.
Mr. Pechter spoke not much about his life at the upper reaches of Corporate America, but rather his life after he quit it all and started teaching high school math for the Teach for America program, trying to help students in inner-city Jersey City push the limits of their own existences, and about how he learned from his students things that he had never learned in the corporate boardrooms.
Ms. Pflatz read from a paper she wrote when she was 10, an essay about what she wanted to be when she grew up. And how she wanted to be a writer, but that never quite worked out, but she did become a photographer of note, inspite of being busy with the rest of her life, and published a few photographic essays with a co-author, and also travels around the world taking photos for NGOs (such as here), and her efforts to break down borders between people with that work and with the Scholarship Fund for Inner-City Children.
And finally came Rick Ufford-Chase, who works at this country's desert border. Mr. Ufford-Chase is Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which he described as being "temporary pope without any power" and Co-Founder and Co-Director of BorderLinks. I wish I had a copy of his speech (but didn't have an opportunity to ask him for one, because I had a meeting immediately following the procession), because this guy ripped the USA for living the big lie of globalization, how it has come to mean that by our unearned virtue of being Americans, we take everything and give back almost nothing to the rest of the world. And now we want to build a fence?
Something there is that does not love a wall. Indeed.
--Robyn Serven
--Bloomfield College, NJ