TO THE CLASSES OF 2020
Challenges and Opportunities

Some people say you have been given a bad break - a senior year interrupted, no prom and no graduation ceremony.  Hopefully there are plans in the works that will allow some of that to occur this summer.  Despite what has happened, all of your are blessed more than you will ever know.   Over the last fourteen years, thousands and thousands of people have been pulling for you, cheering you, and working toward the day when you leave high school for greater things in 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 have a passion for writing about heroes.  Each week 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, and our dreams.  

     Think kids, just like you: 

     Have helped men to travel to the moon and have helped an old 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 and set records 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.  We have played in the major leagues, major college football, and the NBA.   We have been all stars on the field and off.  We have appeared on postage stamps and on the covers of Life and Sports Illustrated magazines.  We have commanded aircraft carriers.  Three of us have flown with the highly heralded Tuskegee Airmen. 

     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 were sick. We have painted magnificent works of art and painted our neighbor's house for free.

     We have been champions of our state,  country, and world  and have 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 parents 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 were due the next day. We have won dozens of 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 the 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 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 have 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 of an airplane in the pre dawn hours of the invasion of Normandy 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 are just some of the things you can do. Your parents and your teachers have given you all the opportunities.  Now, it's  up to you.    

     "We are all put on the Earth for a purpose, and that purpose is to build and not to destroy," the comedian Red Skelton always said.  The great baseball player Roberto Clemente said, "''Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don't, then you are wasting your time on Earth."

     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 its newest graduating class.  After a long, hot, humid and arduous day, the portly old gentleman rose to speak.  All of 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 for the rest of your lives is to make us, your parents, the parents of the true "Greatest Generation" and before you leave this world make yourselves the parents of an even greater generation."  

     Congratulations to the Classes of 2020!  May the opportunities you have been given will lead you to conquer any challenge put in front of you on the roads of life.  Seek out your opportunities, seize them, and never let go of your dreams.  And, when you get the chance, party like it is not 2020!