Documentary film maker Ken Burns recently delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of Brandeis University. Read it here.
Or watch it here:
Here is a taste of Karen Tumulty’s piece at The Washington Post:
Burns offered some elegantly phrased life advice — “Leadership is humility and generosity squared.” At a university with a long Jewish heritage and large Jewish student body (which has withstood the threefold horror of Oct. 7, the Gaza war and a spike in antisemitism), he counseled: “There’s only us. There is no them. Whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life, that there is a them, run away.” He added, “Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self-imprisonment.” His plea to oppose repression everywhere earned sustained applause.
His most compelling words came when he departed, apologetically, from his usual position of neutrality. “Do not be seduced by easy equalization,” he said. “There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives.” He bluntly warned that “the presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids,” a drug meant to alleviate pain whereby “you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, a bigger delusion.”
The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.
Read the entire piece here.