On May 8, 2004, Elizabeth Edwards delivered the commencement address at Peace College, a women's college in Raleigh, N.C. This was two months after her husband had dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and before John Kerry chose him as running mate.
I was among those who met Mrs. Edwards that morning. She said she had rewritten her speech overnight. As I have it in my computer, I just re-read the earlier version of her address, and found it to be touching and relevant tonight ...
Elizabeth Edwards
Commencement Address
Peace College
May 8, 2004
In the past year as I have campaigned with my husband across this country, I have learned that it is not so hard to fill a dozen minutes with words. What is hard is to say something important, something worth saying, something worth remembering.
It is my job today to say something worth remembering – but I will be honest with you: what you need to know cannot come from me – it can only come from you, from the magical alchemy that takes place inside you daily as you learn from your parents, your teachers, your friends, as you open a book or a newspaper or turn on a television or visit a website.
Some pieces of the world and of each of us come in and become part of the combustion that turned the girl you were yesterday when you walked onto this campus into the woman you are today as you get ready to leave.
And some pieces flow past you – a breeze against your shoulder perhaps – but they don’t become you.
What makes the difference is what makes us different from one another. In my world it is what makes you a Republican or a Democrat. It is what makes some people relativists and others absolutists. The magic of it makes the birthing, the living, even the dying have meaning, each separate from one another.
And that is the way we like to think about it – each separate and complex and competitive. Each with a beauty, a music within us that we have only to find a way to let others see or hear. And it has always been this way.
From the women who scraped gardens from this soil centuries ago, to those who stood for sale in slave markets all too close to where we stand, to women who today clutch their children a half world a way and wonder in Sudan if they will be able to feed them and wonder in Iraq whether they can keep them safe.
But we are lucky. You are lucky, to be free and American and bright and educated. Today the music in you is right here at the surface; I can see it in your faces.
I speak to you today not only as the commencement speaker but also as a parent who will, within the month, sit where your parents sit and watch my oldest daughter graduate from college. It is a good seat from which to construct this message. I speak to you as if I am speaking to a class of my daughters, to all young women stepping from behind their families, their classmates, their schools and facing the world.
We have not handed you the world I wish we could have. There are troubles in too many quarters. There is pain in too many homes. There is too much hatred, too much anger, too much fear. … We apologize. And we ask you to help us change all that. Part of changing it, though, is seeing it for what it is. We are part of a bigger whole – not just in this world but in all of history – everything that came before and everything that comes after. If you take care, aware of your place in this continuum, you can do what we have not and fulfill the promise of a better world, so that some day thirty years from now when one of you stands here, you will have no need to apologize. You will hand your daughters a better world than we have handed you.
Now, it is too easy to say the right things here – to say to you what is essentially true: you have met our expectations, and so often you have exceeded them. And here we hand you a new set of expectations: contribute to your communities, have pride in your work, raise families of integrity and purpose. You know what our society values: beauty, prosperity, generosity, accomplishment, celebrity, faith, valor. And you know – because you are lovely and learned and full of grace – that you can meet these expectations.
These expectations are your society’s expectations – and that does not make them bad. In so many ways, they are an apex. But they are expectations that are contrived from the peculiar advantages we have and the way we have arranged our lives. At the same time that they are grand, however, they are limited by our own circumstances. What makes a goal worthwhile? If it is worthwhile, can it be change? Can time or geography alter what is prized? Is it a job or an honor or just a meal and shelter? What matters in the end, when all is dust? I think I know what matters. It is that you have been true to yourself.
The usual fare is to tell you what society hopes for you – to find prosperity and beauty, to work with honor for the dignity of your work and for the sake of others. All this is right – I cannot and would not tell you otherwise. But you know this already, don’t you?
As your speaker, as a mother, I tell you to listen less to the cacophony of expectations – and listen instead to yourself. What feels right to you? There is no real joy in seeking someone else’s muse, even if you do manage to hunt her down. There are places – and don’t ever forget them – and there are young women – don’t let them fade into a crowd – who cannot decide what you can decide today. You get to say: This is what gives me joy, this is what gives me purpose, this should be my life’s work. And I get to say: Do that. Choose that. Stop doing what is expected because it is what is expected. Start making choices for yourself. What do you want from tomorrow? Where do you want to be in five years or ten or twenty? There are no more tests. There are no more grades. There is no box on your report card to be checked if you are making adequate life progress.
We get only one go-through in life, so this is my advice: it is your choice how you use it. Don’t hand that choice to me or to your friends or even to your parents.
And don’t ever be afraid to say that this is not the path I meant to take, don’t ever be afraid to start over and get it right. I have done that so many times. It is unlikely that you will get it right on your first effort. But we have to able to say we were wrong – there is no shame in that – and then to try to get it right.
See that woman next to you – maybe someone you competed with to have the best paper in a class? Well, that’s over. Her successes have nothing to do with you starting today. You have seen the covers of magazines, the posters at the theatre, the faces on television. They are not your competition. They are this moment’s idea of chic or beautiful, and not just limited to this moment’s but also to this latitude and longitude. Twenty years ago or ten thousand miles from here, there is another idea of beauty altogether. This cannot be where you make your stand. What endures? Status? Is there some celestial ranking of us all – one more worthy than the next? Are we somehow better in any way than that mother in Sudan clutching her hungry child? Who believes that? Only those who think they rank above another living, breathing, loving, fearing human being. Don’t measure yourself that way. And remember your place – your separate and valuable place in the march of women to be what it is possible to be and to leave the doors open for their daughters and for the daughters of generations to come. That’s what you do, whether it seems like it or not – by doing what is right for you: you allow others to do what is right for them; you cast aside roles and limitations and even expectations, and you live your chosen life.
Starting now you are measured against one yardstick and one yardstick only: have you stretched that facile mind and pushed that vital body as far you as you can? Have you reached, and then stretched even farther – or have you stood still? Have you happened to life or has life happened to you?
This is what I think: you will leave here – wiser, more confident, richer than when you came, which is what Peace College is about. You will find a path that is right for you, and then one holiday you will come home to these parents and to your friends, and someone will say: “So, whatcha been up to?” And you will describe what you have chosen do. And whatever it is – small or large, private or notorious, unheralded or honored – you will have earned your pride in what you do and who you are, and you, like the women before you and the women after you, will have made the world hear the music that is ignited within you. So this is my message: it is your choice. Yours. Good luck and godspeed.