First of all, let me say how honored I am to have been chosen to give this keynote address tonight.
Although some of you know that I’ve been somewhat stressed lately, my stress levels must not be high enough yet, because I was given only one day’s advance notice that I would be giving this talk. Keep that in mind in deciding how much you want to applaud at the end.
I’d like to talk briefly tonight about the power of community.
This past weekend, my wife and I went to see the movie The King’s Speech. Without spoiling the movie for those who haven’t seen it yet, there is a very powerful moment in the middle of the film where the speech therapist is explaining to the king how he helped people who were traumatized during the war. “People need two things,” he said. “They need to find their voice… and they need to know that someone is listening.”
(And, by the way, after all that students have been doing for me over the past seven days, let me tell you… someone is listening.)
The metaphor of finding your voice is a very powerful one. Research shows us that a “voice” is not something we are born with. It’s something we develop gradually over the course of many years.
A liberal arts education has a very important role to play in helping people to find their voice. One theory suggests a five-step process in finding and learning to trust your voice. I’ve watched with delight over the years as many of my students have moved from stage one (or two) to stage four (or five) over the course of their time here at UWMC. Think of this campus as one giant voice development center.
The addition of the Center for Civic Engagement adds a whole new dimension to this as well! The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state. Think how far that means your voice can carry, especially with the great acoustics in the new theater!
Sometimes, it’s hard to trust your voice because it’s different from other voices. That’s why a place where many different voices are honored is so important. Some students have told me that it wasn’t until they came to UWMC that they discovered that there were other people in the world like them, other people who had similar voices.
A voice isn’t something you develop on your own. It comes through community. An infant who is never spoken to, who never hears others speaking, never develops a voice. Or, they develop a voice, but don’t learn how to pay attention to other voices. Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier calls this “dialogues of the deaf”.
You develop your voice through interaction and dialogue, whether it be a face-to-face discussion or, as I’m starting to learn this week, a Facebook conversation. (By the way, I’m up to 85 Facebook friends now. Don’t ever tell me that a person is too old to learn something new!)
The collective voice of a community is always louder and stronger than the individual voices of which it is made.
This is even true in the nonhuman realm. Many of my students have viewed my classic Hornet Man picture, which depicts my battle a few summers ago with some persistent and angry insects that decided to make the eaves of our roof their home. I learned to my dismay that a large enough group of insects is smarter than a college professor, even though I have a three-digit IQ. Biologists call this “swarm intelligence”. An individual hornet may not know very much, but when it shares what it does know with other hornets, they are a force to be reckoned with. Collectively, the swarm is nearly indestructible because it doesn’t rely exclusively on any individual hornet, and yet each member of the swarm has its indispensible place.
A voice, then, isn’t something you develop by yourself, and it’s not something you use just for yourself.
Eighty years ago, at the height of the Great Depression, an out-of-work man named “Doc” Cole decided to join a unique foot race. The race was to begin in Los Angeles and end in New York City, three thousand miles away. The winner was to receive ten thousand dollars, which would be about $130,000 today.
Doc started out as a fierce competitor, but as the miles rolled by, he got to know his fellow racers and to listen to their stories and their voices. Soon he began to realize that the race wasn’t just about him. It was about a story of suffering and survival that had gripped the entire country, and he decided to do something about it.
On the last day of the race, Doc found himself far ahead of the pack of other runners and would have easily bagged the ten thousand dollar prize. But, ten feet short of the finish line, he stopped, held out his arms, and waited for the next runner. They linked hands and waited for the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. When there were finally 20 runners in a row, they all raised their arms in unison, stepped across the finish line, and Doc shouted, “We won!”
That’s community.
My wish for you today is that you will all take the next step in finding your community and your voice, and that when you find it, yours will be a voice for good in the world.
Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment