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Cary Karacas commencement speech, 13 May 2006
If I had known that Michael Johns expected today’s speakers to convey a sense of what it means to be a clear, realistic, and critical thinker, I wouldn’t have waited to write my speech until a half hour ago in the men’s bathroom.
Distinguished faculty, students, and guests, it is honor to stand before you as representative of my fellow doctoral graduates. Given that I am the only person receiving a doctorate this year, however, I appear to be representing myself. I’d like to start, then, on a personal note and extend my gratitude to a few people. I thank my parents, Ormand Randall Karacas and Kathryn Earleen Siebert, for not practicing birth control, and for loving me in the most critical years of my development. My first grade teacher, Miss Frawley, for teaching me how to read and for wearing miniskirts. Supportive professors at Los Angeles Valley College, Shirley Lowry and Pat Allen, and at San Francisco State University, Nancy Wilkinson and Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes. I am in particular debt to Professor Allan Pred, who allowed me to take his seminars while I attended SFSU as a master’s student and graciously supported my application to pursue a Ph.D. in the Geography Department at Cal. I also want to acknowledge Professor Michael Johns, and thank him for his guidance over the last handful of years.
I have been blessed in being able to pursue this Ph.D. and through it begin a career largely based on the use of reason and language. Allow me be read a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, called “Incantation,” that treats this theme.
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hands so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
[and] Opens the congealed fist of the past….
Language is an essential component in how we open that congealed fist, or in how we tell our stories about how the world works and, as Lewis Lapham has written, “to extend the reach of the human imagination and enlarge the realm of human possibility.”
We are faced with a critical moment in which we are sorely in need of political regeneration. Surely clear language, thought, and reason must be central in how this is carried out.
Lapham also wrote that “people [are] bound together by their faith in the meaning of words.” There are certain sets of words around which we need to renew our faith, including those found in the Treaty of Westphalia; in the idea of Habeas Corpus; in the many rights afforded by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment, meant to protect us from unreasonable search and seizure; in the Geneva Conventions and the ban on torture; in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obligates countries to with nuclear weapons to take steps toward complete disarmament; and in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which regulates domestic eavesdropping.
In addition to the need for us to recommit ourselves to the meaning of the words contained in the above documents, at this moment in history the imperative is for us to commit ourselves being good citizens. Here, I use the definition given by Deshigu Ichida in his 1990 Peace Proposal to the United Nations.
“Whether we can become good citizens of the world hinges upon the degree of self-control we achieve. It is, after all, the ability to see ourselves penetratingly that enables us to transcend boundaries and ethnic barriers. Peace is a continuum that is consciously maintained through self-restraining individuals in a self-restraining society. Cooperation for peace is necessary in areas of politics, economy, and education, of course, but building peace depends on how many people can be capable of fostering self-restraint.”
I cannot restrain myself, before closing, from thanking a few more people. Thanks to John Coltrane, Van Morrison, and Bruce Springsteen; to the Geography Department staff, Don Bain, Delores Dillard, Darin Jensen, Carol Page, Dan Plumlee, and Natalia Vonnegut, and. Thanks to Yukiko and Eriko Otsuka. I am indebted to Remi Moss for her support throughout my time as a graduate student. Finally, I return to my family. In particular, I thank my brother, Joshua Karacas, and my sister Lia Naimy, who is here with her six-week-old son, Hunter. As kids we experienced way too much unnecessary hardship, but we somehow pulled through it and managed to learn how to live full lives. I love you very much.
I close with another Czeslaw Milosz poem, called “Gift”:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot….
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
My wish is that today’s graduates, and the relatives and friends who have come to celebrate their accomplishment, also experience a day so happy.
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