A friend posted a link to a video of a high school valedictorian who used her speech to criticize the system that she had slaved for through the years of her schooling. She urged students to find their own voices, and not succumb to the pressure to be molded into automatons for the system of corporate economy.
I tried to shield my own children from this system. I said, as a new parent, “Children are born knowing who they are. My goal is that my children still know when they get through school.” And, I think, to a great extent, they do know. But my heart went out to this valedictorian for her courage and the task ahead of her, knowing from my own experience that re-discovering who you are can be a monumental task.
The Valedictorian
She said she wished no more to do as bidden
- too long a slave to school’s arcane demands
She hoped to find where her own spark was hidden
to open out her life with her own hands
She found it her most difficult assignment
the voices of the system so entwined
within her thought, she couldn’t seem to find it
What did she want? What, here, was her own mind?
The layers, like cabbage leaves so tightly wrapped
her voice so far inside as to be silent
while criticisms, cynical and apt
mimic her voice to snipe at her alignment
Take heart, oh Daughter - what your wish has summoned
will rise, will decompress, will overcome.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 13, 2011
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