Lessons learned in life

By BARB PROCTOR MANTZ DRAKE ’67 MLS ’82

It looks like I’m a bit late to the festivities. Forty-three years late, to be precise.

Back in 1967, when I graduated from Bradley — summa cum laude — there was no such thing as a Summa Banquet. There were basketball banquets and sorority banquets and I even remember a newspaper banquet — you’ve heard of newspapers? — but there was nothing quite like tonight’s celebration of academic prowess. I don’t pretend to know all of what America should be doing to make our graduates more competitive with the rest of the world, but I am a believer in one reform. Make it cool to be a top-notch scholar. And it’s really cool to be here tonight.

Think about it. If we cheered our scholars the way we cheer our athletes, if we took mental training as seriously as we do athletic training, if we published a magazine called “Scholars Illustrated”; in short, if we as a culture placed half as much value on academic success as we do on athletic achievement, don’t you think we’d have more high performers? You have succeeded academically in a culture that too often undervalues what you have done, and I applaud you.

Now after you finish patting yourself on the back, please reach around and pat the back of the professor you brought with you. Or maybe I should say, the professor who helped you get here. I got here partly on the shoulders of Paul Snider, who was a superb journalism professor at this university for many, many years. I brought him tonight so I could say thanks — and I’m glad I didn’t miss his deadline because he’d have flunked me. Not just an F, but a zero.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. We all get where we are on someone else’s shoulders. Bradley University is here because Lydia Moss Bradley had the idea and the money and the will to see it built and because an awful lot of people continue to sacrifice their money and their time to keep it going. This country is here because some wise and smart people — we call them the founding fathers, overlooking the founding mothers, but that’s an issue for another speech — this country is here because some wise people invested their minds and their blood in creating it.

I’m going in this direction because I’m bothered by a lot of what I hear on the streets of America today — the anger, the incivility, the blindness to the facts, but mostly the delusion that we can do everything all by ourselves. We Americans are so smart, so capable, that if government and the rest of the world would only leave us alone, we’d be just fine.

That you are here tonight testifies not just to your hard work but to your parents and the fortune of your birth — you weren’t born in Afghanistan, were you? — and your good health and your good intellect. For some of you, it also testifies to a government grant. I am here partly because some people were willing to give a poor kid who aspired to be a journalist a scholarship to go to Bradley almost a half-century ago. In the years since, I have tried to pay it back. I hope you will do the same.

If I were to give a speech entitled Lessons Learned in Life, and that’s not a bad subject, is it, this would be the first one: You can’t do it alone.

And what would be the second?

That it really is important to be informed. You had to expect that coming from a journalist, didn’t you? When I walked out of Bradley and into the newsroom at the Peoria Journal Star, I had faith that Americans would come up with the right solutions to the country’s problems — problems of race, poverty, health care, education, war (sound familiar?) if they just had enough information. That belief motivated me in my newspaper career.

I’m older and not so sure now. The problems are more complex and resistant to change than I understood them to be back then. But I still would like to give the facts a chance, and I know we can’t do without them if we are to govern ourselves well. And I’m really bothered that so many people can’t separate fact from opinion any more, and so many read or watch only the mirror images of their own biases, and so few can distinguish between professional reporting and, well, garbage. I have been saving a column written several years ago by Kathleen Parker, who just last month won the Pulitzer Prize for column writing. Here’s part of what she wrote:

“With the explosion of alternate media, including citizen journalism, the lines between fiction and journalism have become perhaps irrevocably blurred. Speculation is the new journalism… We’ve never had greater access to information or greater difficulty discerning truth…. The danger is that Americans exhausted by too much information will turn it off and leave the business of government to those who shout loudest.”

No wonder she won the Pulitzer. A democracy doesn’t work — it really doesn’t work — if its citizens lack the facts to make good decisions. How will they get those facts in the years to come? I don’t think anyone knows yet — and I hold this up as a real challenge for your generation.

Speaking of shouting the loudest, that brings me to lesson number three: You may be awfully smart, but sometimes the other guy is pretty smart too. And sometimes his ideas will be better than yours. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the name Bob Michel, but he is the longest serving minority leader in the entire history of the House of Representatives. He is from Peoria, and he is a Bradley graduate. In a meeting I and some other Journal Star editors had with him shortly before he retired, Congressman Michel lamented how hard it had become to do what he did best — to get both sides to the table, to work out differences, to forge compromises. Not only was compromise necessary to get anything done, he said, but it actually produced better legislation because one side never had all the answers. That was 15 years ago, and things are much worse now. All of us need to shout less and listen more — and reward those leaders who do the same in our behalf.

For lesson number four, I turn to my mother. One of her favorite sayings went something like: “She should walk a mile in my shoes.” You know, it’s very easy to be critical of others — the single mom trying to raise kids in the housing projects, the man who’s lost his job and hasn’t found another, the uninsured twenty-something who shows up in the emergency room — if you haven’t walked in their shoes. Walking in someone else’s shoes, trying to see things through their eyes, will make you a lot less cocky and a lot more compassionate — good things to be as you go through life.

Lesson number four is followed quickly by lesson number five. I’m thinking of the importance of continuing to learn, not just because it will get you ahead but because it will make life more interesting. You know, life really is fascinating. And if it’s not, then it’s probably your own fault. If you’re an engineer, spend a day at an art museum. If you’re an artist, take a class in astronomy or physics. You have good minds; don’t let them get too comfortable — use them to explore the world. Challenge yourself to think deeply.

Lesson number six. Bad times, bad health, bad luck can take almost everything away from you — except for your integrity. Only you can do that to yourself. Don’t.

Lesson number seven. Love a child. Nothing you do in life will be more rewarding. And if you don’t have a child of your own to love, borrow one. The last few years I’ve been a volunteer tutor in second grade, and every year I meet my kids I fall in love all over again.

Lesson number eight. Give something back. You have marvelous gifts, or you wouldn’t be here. Why not use them to change the world? Seriously. Native Peorian Nancy Goodman Brinker changed the world when she organized the first Race for the Cure after her sister died of breast cancer. Native Peorian Betty Friedan changed the world when she wrote the Feminine Mystique and founded the modern-day women’s movement. Wendy Kopp changed the world when she was in college and wrote a thesis suggesting a program that evolved into Teach for America. College dropout Bill Gates changed the world and continues to do so. But if you want to start small on your mission, that’s fine. Every community in this country can use your help to keep its rivers clean, or mentor its children, or work on making people healthier. You will have just one life. Use it to make a difference.

Lesson number nine. Make time to have fun. Recently I asked your president, Joanne Glasser, what she knows now that she didn’t know before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “What a gift life is,” she responded. “Have fun every day.”

And we have come to the 10th lesson, the last. Come on, you were counting, weren’t you?

Say thanks. Thank the person who waits on you at the grocery store. Thank the clerk at Walgreen’s. Thank those who mop the floors in your apartment buildings when you pass them. Thank the people who served you tonight. You never know the difference a word of appreciation can make in a person’s day, in a person’s life.

Before you leave, I know you will thank the professors who are here with you. Then pick up your phone — don’t text, speak into it like this — and call your parents. Tell them thanks for everything they did to raise … you.

And thank you for letting me speak my mind tonight.