WHAT COUNTS FOR YOUR GENERATION
Rand Araskog Commencement Address at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, May 30, 1999
Members of the Class of 1999, Gustavus Adolphus College:
You should feel pretty good today. You have a special time distinction. You're the last young peoples' generation of the 20th century and you will be the first adult generation of the 21st.
To you, the horse and buggy days, the Model T Ford, the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression of my parents' generation are distant history. World War II and the atom bomb, the Cold War in its iciest stage, the Korean War, the beginning of the space age and the Vietnam War are my generation's to remember.
In your youth, you are taking us out of the century in the best of times. President Reagan was probably the first president you can remember. The bull market of today began during his first term in 1982. You have lived in a positive era, the fall of the Berlin Wall and of communism, an era marred only now by the Kosovo Crisis.
You are participating in the uncorking of a great communications bottle, releasing the Internet phenomena - aol, amazon, yahoo, mindspring - what else ".com." You and your classmates are seeing wealth exploding at a rate in these United States, indeed, around the world, to leave the Forbes magazine editors, who map wealth, aghast at the huge per year increases and the great changes with new names being added to the map. Yet, abject poverty for over a billion people and more, embarrasses every continent.
Medicine is riding a wave of new theory and practice. Could you imagine a cure for the common cold, a cure for cancer, for aids, non-invasive surgery of the brain or heart, probably for sure in your lifetime. Life expectancy continues to climb, from 47 years of age in 1900 to over 80 years at the end of the century. Retirement at age 60 is beginning to look like a waste of at least 10 years of very productive life.
Your generation will be driving an emerging look to science to define the face of God, to explain the universe.
On what I know is a foreboding, but challenging note, your generation will have to find an energy replacement for oil, or by 2050; you will be facing an economic, political and social barrier unknown since the dark ages. You are all too young for the gas lines of the late seventies.
Your generation will face increased daily stress. My parents and grandparents probably felt more pressures than we do - pressure from the outside due to the demands, simplicity and ruggedness of their lives. My generation and yours has been yielding less to pressure from outside and more to stress from inside.
Stress from keeping up with the "bezo" guy next door, stress from dual careers, stress from not knowing which closet to come out of, stress from trying to stop to smell the roses while talking on a cellular phone.
How do you avoid a psychiatrist's couch? I'd try to hold fast to things that really count for your generation:
1. Be patriotic.
Don't be one of those who has to mumble during a surprise pledge of allegiance "to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Vote. Maintain your franchise. Be interested in candidates and issues. Elect people who you believe will be a credit to your view of the office to which they aspire. The people we elect are the protectors of the basic charters by which we Americans live. Hold dear your "amber waves of grain." Never get jaded about your country. Practice and preach what our forefathers declared:
"We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator, with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
The pursuit of happiness. What an elegant way to describe what we Americans, according to our forefathers, deserve.
2. Cherish your heritage.
Happy memories make the pursuit of happiness much easier because you've been there. Cherish your heritage. Cherish the people who sacrificed to get you here - to a great school with a religious bent. Cherish your hometown, your grade school, your high school.
Go back to your roots, whenever you can. Each year or so I try to go back to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, to Ottertail Lake where Jessie and I still own some lakeshore. I visit the farm on the outskirts of town where I spent my first 14 years encompassing the Great Depression and World War II.
I hear the song of the Meadowlark and the great tractor chugging over the hill from Emil Olson's place pulling the threshing machine behind it. I visit Adams Grade School where we played basketball in the basement, my old church site, the cemeteries where our parents are buried. When Jessie is not along, I visit my old pre-Jessie romantic parking spots out by Hoot Lake Dam. You know, stuff like that, and I always come away smiling.
I go to Pebble Lake where Jessie and I had our first date. I was carrying her in the water and I must have had an unusual look in my eyes because all of a sudden she stopped laughing and said, "put me down." Ya sure, ya betcha, I sure did. But that same day, in the evening by Detroit Lakes, I asked her to marry me. I sure did.
I hope each of you has picked up a hill of happy memories from whence you came, a hill you can build into a mountain over your life span - but you have to start with that hill, where your roots are. And if you grew up in rural Minnesota, as I did, never be ashamed of "ya sure, ya betcha."
3. Take care of yourselves.
A year ago, a purported Internet commencement address involved these messages - use sunscreen - take care of your knees - when you're my age you'll be glad. There's an awful lot to that message.
Medicine is making such astonishing advances that preventative medicine should take the front seat between you and your husband or wife. Whether your employer provides one or not, set a day or two in a month each year for an annual physical for you and your partner and never neglect it. Things discovered in these physicals can be eliminated before they become serious or fatal. Blood tests once a year, chest x-rays, need never be neglected and can save so much pain and heartache for you and your children.
4. Build your self-esteem.
How many times have you heard that expression? Building your self-esteem is made easier if you set achievable, realistic goals for yourself. After I left the Office of the Secretary of Defense to work in the Marketing Department of the Aeronautical Division of Honeywell, in Minneapolis, I once, comparing goals with my brother-in-law, Jack Gage, GA 1949, a budding tax attorney, said that my goal in business was to be the Director of Marketing for the Aeronautical Division and earn $50,000 per year.
Three years later, I met that goal, and a year later moved on to ITT where my stretch goal was to succeed Harold Geneen, the CEO of the $25 billion company, even though I was three levels removed running a $25 million division. With an unusual amount of luck, twelve years later, still in my mid-forties, I did.
There are other ways to self-esteem than career success. Helping others is probably the most successful one. Having a happy marriage is another and raising a family you are proud of is yet another. If you have self-esteem, if you do think well of yourself, it is so easy to think well of others and to think positively about your future and theirs. And everyone is attracted to a positive person.
5. Have fun - take risks - be interested.
I have always counseled young people during my business career, to have fun, enjoy your job. If you can't, move on. Take the risk, try something else, somewhere else, but don't stagnate. Think of all the risks you have run already, mostly having fun and doing things you probably shouldn't have, I would guess.
When I found out my daughter had been bungee jumping, I visibly winced. But what do I tell Minnesotans about risk? On a lake with my brother-in-law last summer, I saw this 5' diameter perforated ball bouncing around behind a circling motor boat. I was astonished to learn it was a Minnesota father driving along in that boat with his 6-year-old son in the ball. So much for plain old water skiing!
Be interested in the passing scene. Jessie and I have traveled the world over and I certainly did not take enough time to admire the wonders we came across. Once, hurrying through the Louvre, Jessie suddenly grabbed me by the arm and said, "Rand, that's the 'Mona Lisa'." I said "great painting" and started off. She pulled me back and said, "No wait, just stand here and look at her for a few minutes out of your lifetime." Well, I did.
Your interest can also be sparked by what you read. Jessie and I are fortunate to have easy access to The New York Times. When we were first married and lived in Washington, D.C., we took The Washington Post - then in Minneapolis The Star and Tribune - but then came The New York Times and there is nothing like it. Wherever you are, get The Times, get a subscription or buy it off the newsstand if you can. After a few months, you will not want to live without it. It stretches your mind.
6. Keep God with you.
As the first adult generation of the 21st century, you will undoubtedly participate in an increasingly serious quest to understand God and the universe. It's really coming on. Outside of your religious life here at Gustavus, there is a growing commotion out there to understand that God does exist, that God did start all of this.
On December 24, Christmas Eve Day 1997, The Wall Street Journal published an op ed piece "Science Resurrects God." It included a recitation of Einstein's revelation "The more I study science, the more I believe in God," and continued with description of increasing belief among scientists that there was a creator - a divine providence.
On May 24,1998, an article in The New York Times was entitled "The Most Religious Century." It began with a quote from Norman Mailer: "Religion to me is now the last frontier." The writer concluded that "when Mr. Mailer, ripe with years and not particularly known as a pious man, emphasizes the importance of religion, you may be sure the 21st century will be the most religious century in 500 years."
The July 27, 1998 Newsweek magazine proclaimed, in its feature story "Science Finds God." It reviewed the series of revelations and events defining God from the works of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. The thesis was that the achievement of modern science once thought to contradict religion and undermine faith, for a growing number of scientists, these same achievements offer support for spirituality and hints at the very nature of God."
The very nature of God - in my childhood at Augstana Lutheran church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, we sang an anthem you may know, "Open mine eyes that I may see, glimpses of truth thou hast for me."
Your generation will probably get more than your generation's share of glimpses of truth about our place and God's role in all of this. Keep your own eyes open, don't miss those glimpses, remembering that the clearest ones may come in your backyard on a starry night, in the eyes of your children, and in your house of worship. And if your faith is ever shaken, if events cause you to question whether God loves you, indeed, whether there is a God, remember the alternative. In that regard, I think Norman Mailer is trying to make up for lost time. I think it occurred to him that he was gambling unnecessarily with his situation after life on earth.
And now the last thing that counts for you:
7. Don't neglect hugs and kisses.
When you're seriously dating, you don't need this advice. When you're first married, you don't either. But as you go along, there is a tendency to ease up on hugs and kisses. Don't do it. Those you love and those who love you, need them and so do you. Jessie taught me that!
That's what counts for your generation!
And now from both of us, Good luck and God speed!
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