Over our 20-odd years as students, I'm sure we've all been given (more than once) the advice of choosing a hero to model ourselves after: our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our presidents, sometimes our peers. (Yes, even young people can change the world. Mozart, after all, had written his first sonata by the age of four.)
Surveying the forerunners of our generation, I can't help thinking of a certain young woman, not yet 20, who is rather exceptional. Her first hardcover book just hit the stands, and several others have been written about her. She's signed contracts with major television networks, plus several movie studios. Her face has graced the cover of the most widely-read magazines in America, and Drew Barrymore played her on television. Her name is Amy Fisher.
While most of us who dream of publishing books and being immortalized on the silver screen have spent the past two decades preparing ourselves, Amy Fisher just went out and did it. Next thing you know, she'll be posing with Michael Jordan in Nike commercials.
What's the moral of her story? If she were our commencement speaker, what would Amy Fisher tell our class? That it would have been more expedient and less expensive to shoot rather than study our way to success?
I do not recommend Amy Fisher as a personal hero (for one thing, she has bad aim.) But as her peers, I think we have something to learn from her experience.
We live in a society where expedience often comes before morality, where violence against one another is always glamorized, sometimes exonerated. While those of us who have had the privilege of an education know better, many children grow up in this country believing that things can be rectified -- even accomplished -- by picking up a gun instead of picking up a book. The mass media does everything it can to reinforce this message, as we saw on the unfortunate night when all three networks ran their own versions of the Amy Fisher story.
There's a simple explanation for all this: in a capitalist society, supply responds to demand. If nobody wanted to watch the Amy Fisher story, nobody would broadcast the Amy Fisher story. I don't mean to sound like Hillary Clinton, but it all comes down to a question of values.
We've learned something about values here at Dartmouth -- at least, we've been exposed. We abided by the same Honor Code, ran around the same bonfire, hiked the same mountain, sang the same songs. Our experiences have been different, but in our own ways, we've all shared in a fellowship stressing individuality, community, diversity, love.
These are the tools we, unlike most in our generation, have been given. We are not meant to put these tools away in the shed on graduation day, but to take them out into the world to fix the splintered floorboards and leaky pipes. Because if we don't do it, the flood will surely come.
The repairs will not be easy. Sometimes it will be more expedient and less expensive to just cover up the mess. But you should know better by now. The true heroes are not the quick-fixers who put their gum in the leaks and smile for the cameras; they are the plumbers whose hard work more often than not goes unnoticed.
So when you come to the inevitable points in your life when you hold a gun in one hand and Catullus in the other, remember Dartmouth College. Flip through your yearbook. Dust off your diploma. Put on your '93 jersey, go outside and scream the alma mater at the top of your lungs. Some avenues in life are less direct but infinitely more empowering than others.
