My Speech to 2015 College Grads

Graduation speech time has arrived again on schedule as certain as a Fox News blonde includes Barrack Obama’s middle name when listing one of the 6,039 (and counting) ways the President has destroyed America. 

Famous Speechers…POTUS and FLOTUS, writers of prose & poetry and bloggerty and hashtaggerty, corporate makers and shakers of the takers, to the famous, (famous for being famous)…and electronic thespians analog and digital, people elected by people to serve the interests of the people and Teabaggers elected by the corporations to serve the interest of the corporations. The Appointed, the Anointed; the hedge-funded, the digerati disrupters and StartMe-Uppers…all with advice for the ages…18-24…the college grads capped and gowned heads pounding from their last night in academia and beer pongia.  And their advice? Follow your passion. Use your privileged education to better the world. Don’t take the easy path. And wear sunscreen of course. Motion picture actor and director Robert DeNiro recently told New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts — graduates “You made it. And, you’re fcuked.” Did he mean good luck paying off four years of college debt? Landing a job for those with a degree in history of alternative desert nomad cultures or mystical Renaissance religious cults… Or was he simply paying literal tribute to four years of the best/most sex those students will ever have? What ever he meant, his words barely registered a trickle of giggles and head-nodding wake-ups from the soon to be launched and credentialed graduates. They’ve heard it all before. Some of them from pre-school, kindergarten, junior high and high school graduation ceremonies. 

Good Afternoon Graduates! Wake up goddamit! Here..chew & swallow these..quickly (flinging out over the crowd of listless grads handfuls of vicodins..) gottem swallowed? Ok, listen up. And listen too! “I HAVE ABANDONED MY SON..THERE WILL BE BLOOD.  Sorry..my favo movie..ok, pills working yet? Graduates! Today you stand here…sit here…with great expectations, dreams and stomachs that feel like the Koch brothers are fraking up your ass. Dream on little expectorants…what you have achieved these past four years is highly esteemed by Dalitesh, who shovels out cesspools by hand in a northern India city. Your long hours of cramming for exams, writing Internet derivative essays and learning how to form political & social alliances on campus was highly admired by 18 year old Fatu in Sierra Leone who convulsively bled to death from Ebola last year. Oh, and yes, your management of social networks, your skilled hashtag activism really made a difference to Myung Seok and her family imprisioned in a North Korean labor camp for the past four years. Your struggles to expose the rape culture, (about time!) on this campus and others is especially appreciated by Kanleakhana, a 10 year old sex slave girl in Bangkok. Yes, these past four years have changed you in many ways. You’re certifiably educated now. Stop dreaming. Throw your passion in the pits, get a job, thank your parents or someone. Don’t be a dick.  Those pills working yet? Feeling better? 

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