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SPEECH TO JANUARY 1968 GRADUATES
BINGHAMTON CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
SUNDAY, JANUARY 28, 1968
ROD SERLING
http://www.rodserling.com/01281968.htm

[snip]

I'm thinking back, now, to my own moment on this stage in 1942, when the hundred and forty pounds were then a hundred and eighteen ... the hairline was unreceded ... when my dear friend, Helen Foley, out there, had less gray in her hair but was no more beautiful than she is today—and when the late and beloved Henry Merz tried to explain to me why I couldn't get into the varsity football game because he found it difficult to reconcile playing a quarterback who weighed less than the team bulldog. All these things come back now, and have during the forty-eight hours I've been walking these streets of my youth.

So I preface a few remarks this evening with this plea for some degree of compassion on the part of you young people. Allow him this moment of recollection and keep in mind that twenty-five years from now you may well retrace your steps as I have and come back into this ugly and beloved room and wish in your heart of hearts, as I find myself wishing, that the twenty-five years had not gone by and that they could be relived. With more wisdom, perhaps, with more farsightedness, with more logic and reason and balance—but however—to be re-lived so that the mirror would once again reveal the unlined, marvelous face of youth that looks back with no fears and no trepidations, with an acceptance of challenge and with a dedication to meet the challenge.

And this is, of course, what I'm here to talk about. Challenge. Are you tough enough—that's the theme. That's the question. Are you tough enough? I submit to you, young ladies and gentlemen, of all the virtues of man—toughness is the singular quality most required of you on this 28th day of January, the nineteen hundred and sixty eighth year of our Lord. Roddy—that kid of twenty-five years ago, and his contemporaries—had a few challenges of their own. World War Two. A brief lemonade after the Graduation ceremonies—and then a train to the induction centers. It was that way for most of us.

But we had some things going for us that you don't have. We had a sense of rightness. We had a sense of morality. The world had been botched up by the preceding generation—but our course was relatively clear. We were simply there to repair the damage that had been done and to make damned sure that our children would have no such chore. But ... the best laid schemes o'mice and men go oft a-gley. So here, this evening, this member of a preceding generation stands in front of you by way of an apology that we did our job most improperly. We, in a sense, settled nothing and we have left you a world far more botched than the one that was left to us.

But what follows are very subjective opinions of my own. You don't have to buy any of these commodities. I offer them not as undying truths—but personal points of view. And if you question them—that's not only your right—it is very much your responsibility. Because part of your challenge is to seek out truth, to come up with a point of view not dictated to you by anyone, be he a congressman, even a minister, and most certainly not this aging writer from Hollywood, California.