Acclaimed Historian and Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball, The Roosevelts, and The U.S. and the Holocaust) warned college graduates during a commencement address at Brandeis University on May 19, 2024, about the perils of eliminating or watering down history instruction as well as not voting for Democracy in the 2024 Presidential elections.
In his opening remarks, the famed filmmaker pointed out that there were forces (MAGA for example) that “seem determined to eliminate or water down difficult parts of our past (the study of history,) particularly when the subject may seem to some an anachronistic and irrelevant pursuit(another veiled reference to historically distorting Trumpists,) and particularly with the ferocious urgency this moment (the 2024 elections) seems to exert on us” and reminded those assembled that he has to “remind people of the power our past also exerts, to help us better understand what’s going on now with compelling story, memory, and anecdote. It is my job to try to discern patterns and themes from history to enable us to interpret our dizzying and sometimes dismaying present.”
Citing a young Abraham Lincoln who warned that we are the seeds of our own prosperity or self-destruction with “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide,” Burns went on to warn about the forces of nativism and isolationism that plague elements of the American populace, saying:
“But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level…”
Burns continued with concrete examples of the divisions within the United States today, relaying:
“But it’s clear as individuals and as a nation, we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. That, for example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead.”
“Could you?”
After remarking that many are slaves to their prejudices and preoccupations with items like money, for example, Burns warned against the return of Donald Trump to power, calling him a “seducer, the opioid of opioids,” and the fulfillment of Lincoln’s assertion that he is the seed of our national self-destruction, offering:
“There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, “The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, “a bigger delusion”, James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.”
In closing, Burns called the graduates to act, defeat the forces of political and cultural oppression, and vote this November, movingly stating:
“Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, “God in us”. Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere. Convince your government, as Lincoln understood that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; They just make our country worth defending. Remember what Louis Brandeis said, “The most important political office is that of the private citizen.” Vote. You indelibly… Please, vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and Godspeed.
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