It’s graduation season again, and since local journalists aren’t exactly the most compelling folks to have at graduation ceremonies, I decided a long time ago to just write my own comencement speech every year in case anybody cared to hear what I had to say. So, here goes nothin’.
Congratulations, Class of 2026. You made it.
You survived a pandemic that canceled your middle school years, a political climate that would make a therapist retire early, and an economy that looked at the concept of affordable housing and laughed until it cried. You grew up with the entire sum of human knowledge in your pocket and somehow still had to ask your parents how to mail a letter. You are, by any reasonable measure, exhausted. And you haven’t even started yet.
So before you throw that cap in the air and go find the nearest air-conditioned restaurant to celebrate, I need to tell you two things. They’re important. One of them is about you, and one of them is about all of us.
Let’s start with you.
There is a dream you have. Maybe it’s a business. Maybe it’s a song you’ve been writing in your head for three years. Maybe it’s a place you want to go, a thing you want to build, a life that looks nothing like the one everyone seems to expect from you. You know the one. It’s the idea you bring up at dinner and someone older immediately explains why it won’t work.
Here’s what I want you to know: start anyway.
I don’t mean “someday.” I don’t mean after you get settled, after you figure out your finances, after you find the right moment. The right moment is a myth invented by people who are afraid. I know this because I have spent a significant portion of my adult life waiting for it, and I can tell you with great confidence that it does not show up on schedule. It doesn’t RSVP. It doesn’t text you back.
You are graduating into a world that, for all its chaos, has handed your generation something genuinely remarkable: the ability to build something from nothing without asking anyone’s permission. You can reach an audience, start a business, learn a skill, connect with a mentor, and launch an idea from the same device you use to watch videos of dogs being surprised by their own tails. Previous generations had to beg gatekeepers. You can walk around the gate entirely.
That is extraordinary. Don’t waste it waiting for someone to tell you you’re ready.
You’re not going to feel ready. Nobody does. Readiness is mostly a feeling that arrives about six months after you’ve already started and survived. The people you admire most — the ones who built the things you love, who made the art that moves you, who started the companies you use every day — almost none of them felt ready. They just started. They started small, they started scared, and they started now.
So whatever it is: start now. Not after graduation. Not after the summer. Not after college. Now. Today. Before the tassel is even off your cap.
Now. The second thing.
You grew up in a country that has been politically polarized for as long as you can remember. The shouting has been the background noise of your entire childhood. The division, the contempt, the sense that your neighbors are your enemies — it has been so constant, so loud, and so relentless that I think many of you have simply accepted it as the natural state of things.
It isn’t.
I need you to hear that clearly: this is not normal. This is not who we are. This is not the whole story.
I am old enough to remember when Americans disagreed — loudly, passionately, sometimes furiously — and still managed to be neighbors. Still managed to coach each other’s kids and sit in the same church pews and share a table at Thanksgiving without it becoming a hostage negotiation. We have always had differences. We have always argued. But somewhere along the way, the argument stopped being about ideas and started being about enemies, and that is a different thing entirely.
You are the generation that gets to decide whether that continues.
The things that unite the people of this country are not small things. They are not trivial. They are the bones of the whole operation — a belief that people deserve freedom, that hard work should mean something, that the kid born without advantages deserves a shot anyway. We have never agreed on exactly how to get there. We probably never will. But the destination? Most of us want the same one. We’ve just been convinced otherwise by people who profit from the convincing.
Don’t let them win.
Be the person in the room who refuses to see the person across from them as an enemy. Be the one who asks questions instead of throwing grenades. Be the one who remembers that the loudest voices on any screen are almost never the most representative ones — they’re just the loudest. The country is bigger, quieter, and more decent than what you see in a comment section. I promise you that.
So here’s the whole speech, condensed: Start the thing. And don’t give up on each other.
The world you’re walking into needs both. It needs your ideas, your energy, your refusal to wait for permission. And it needs your generation to be the one that decides the division stops here — not because it’s easy, but because you grew up in the fire and you know better than anyone what it costs.
You’ve got the whole thing in front of you, Class of 2026.
Go do something worth talking about.