TO THE CLASS OF 2018
Challenges and Opportunities
Challenges and Opportunities
The four short years you have just completed will prepare you for the world you now enter. The lessons you have learned in this school will help to get you through the bad times and only make the good times that much better. I first wrote this challenge for the 2007 Class of Dublin High School. More than a decade later, the challenge is even harder for students entering an ever-changing, increasingly impersonal, more violent world.
I have a passion for writing about heroes. Each week for more than 21 years, I write stories about those who have gone before us. You are the heroes of our future. It is now up to you to carry the torch that others have carried before you. You are our legacy, our opus, our dreams.
Just think kids, just like you right here in Laurens County;
Have helped men to travel to the moon and have helped old an woman up a mountainous flight of stairs. Have danced on Broadway and taken their daughters to hundreds and hundreds of dance lessons.
We have played in the Super Bowl and we have coached our son’s midget league football teams. We have played in the Masters Golf Tournament and toiled in the factory to make the Green Jackets of the Masters Champions.
There were two of us who gave their lives on the rocky shores of Iwo Jima and thousands of us who held our children all night when they are sick. We have painted magnificent works of art and painted our neighbor’s house for free.
We have been champions of our state and country and championed the causes of those who can’t fight for themselves. Several of us have written the news for the country’s greatest newspapers and too many of us have been the one to tell parent’s the news that their child was killed in a car wreck.
One of us became the youngest female lawyer in the history of Georgia and the first woman to be certified as a surgeon in the Northeast. We have been All Americans in football, baseball, basketball and wrestling and we have given our all for America on the jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of the Middle East.
One of us has been saluted as one of the greatest African-American inventors of the 20th Century and a lot of us have stayed up half of the night helping our kids finish their science projects which are due the next day. We have won silver star medals for heroism and have done heroic acts with no recognition sought or given.
Several of us have been at the top of university classes and hundreds of us have taught thousands small children how to read. We have been admirals and generals, and we have marched through the mud and snow of bitter winters of World War II.
One of us has been a Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and many have defended those who couldn’t defend themselves. We have been prisoners of war and many of us have kept the bad guys off the street so we can sleep at night and play on the playgrounds.
We have been among the top musicians in the country and have sung in the church choir for fifty years. One of our teachers and our mothers has been among the first women to be drafted in the first National Women’s Basketball League and many of our mothers have cooked a hundreds and even thousands of cupcakes to raise money for the PTA.
We have been the marshal of the District of Columbia and gathered on the National Mall to seek the freedoms of all Americans. One of us has pitched in the major leagues and the luckiest of us has pitched a wiffle ball to our kids in the back yard.
We have built beds and sat by those same beds where our parents died. Several of us have been honored in Halls of Fame and many of us have walked the halls of hospitals in anticipation of the birth of our first born.
We have been the first African-American woman vice president of CBS radio and transmitted radio messages in times of civil disasters. We have jumped out an airplane in the pre dawn hours of the invasion of Normandy, served as Tuskegee Airmen, and we have jumped for joy when our child got their first hit in tee ball.
We have been Speaker pro tem of the Georgia legislature and have spoken to thousands of the principles of faith, hope and love. We have served on some of the state’s and nations most important boards and we have served food to the hungry when no one else would.
These of the just some of the things you can do. Your parents and your teachers have given you all the tools. Now, it’s up to you.
If I could, I would like to leave you with a simple message. It comes in the form of one of the world’s greatest commencement addresses. Sir Winston Churchill, the legendary Prime Minister of Great Britain was invited back to his boyhood school to speak to it’s newest graduating class. After a long, hot, humid and arduous day, the portly old gentleman rose to speak. All those in attendance expected a litany of maxims and guiding principles from the one of the world’s greatest philosophers. In a one sentence speech he told the class, “Gentlemen, life is tough, but never, ever give up.”
I am a child of what has been called the “Greatest Generation.” My challenge to you is to make us, your parents and grandparents, the parents and grandparents of the true “Greatest Generation” and make yourselves the parents of an even greater generation.”
Congratulations to the Class of 2018!
When presented with a good opportunity, seize it. When you are asked to serve your community say “yes.” When you see someone in need, help out. And, spend the rest of the days of your lives sharing your blessings with anyone who needs them most..
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