On May 23 2020, Clinical Professor Anne Marie Goetz delivered (online, pre-recorded) the Alumna Commencement speech for the 2020 graduating class at United World College of South-East Asia (UWCSEA)
The recorded delivery is a slightly abridged version of the text that follows:
Let me start by congratulating you for graduating from this wonderful and demanding school. You are graduating under particularly difficult and unique circumstances – with almost no warning you have had to lock-down or leave the country and finish your classes and even your finals online. Warmest congratulations for your resilience – and congrats to your parents and teachers too.
Graduation is such a joyful event and an important rite of passage. I do hope that you are with loved ones right now and making an occasion of it. But there is no sugar-coating the fact that your graduation this spring is unlike any other. There are 1.3 billion children out of school because of COVID-19, but for you young adults graduating this spring, the losses and deprivations imposed by the pandemic are particularly acute. It is not just about missing your moment on stage with your diploma. It is about those last months before the big transition to the rest of your life. It is about missing the chance to say goodbye to friends, it’s about cancelling the plans for the summer in a Buddhist retreat in Bhutan, or backpacking in Bulgaria, or beekeeping in Bolivia. Perhaps worst of all is the sense of being put on pause until this crisis is resolved.
You may be sick of talking about COVID-19, but the way that the world is responding now will shape your future like no other event in human history. From one day to the next, features of economies and society that we for decades had considered essential, unalterable, are melting away, opening opportunities to do things differently. Whatever happens next, we are in a precarious moment, because we know that it was the old way of doing things that got us to this place, made our health systems so fragile and our politics so volatile and our states so incapable. Like it or not, we each have a role to play in emerging from this crisis.
It was a much less volatile world when I graduated from this school 40 years ago. 1980 was the year the Rubik’s cube and Post-it Notes and the Pac-Man game came out. CNN pioneered 24-hour news. But there was plenty of volatility then. Thatcher and Reagan declared that government was the problem and society did not exist. The Iran hostage crisis had began, nuclear testing was going on in the Pacific, apartheid seemed dug-in in South Africa, and the Cold War got so hot that the US boycotted the Olympics in Moscow. We never imagined that the Berlin wall would come down, or that Mandela would get out of jail.
We all know that it is high time for major changes in the way we organize economies, societies, families, governments, and above all in the way we engage with nature and our planet. The coronavirus crisis has helped us to see what is truly ‘essential’ and what human security really means. Not hypersonic missiles, but hundreds of millions of face masks. Not lifting environmental regulations, but the gift of cleaner air and water. Not the stock market traders who bet on business failures, but the grocery store shelf-stackers, the nurses and the cleaners, the workers at the food banks, the train and bus drivers, the home-based parents cleaning and cooking and schooling. These are the jobs that are underpaid or not paid at all, these are the jobs with no emergency cushions of savings or paid leave. But these are the functions we need performed most of all.
For some years everyone I know has been asking themselves: where did we go wrong? Why are we organized to ensure the extraction and hoarding of vast wealth by the very few instead of well-being of the many? As a feminist I have studied how economies rest on underpaid or unpaid care work, and how we assign that work to people we do not value, to women, to migrants. We take this work and these people for granted. We do the same thing with the environment, we take it for granted, we extract and deplete rather than sustain. The only way to sustain what Greta Thunberg has condemned as ‘fairy tales of eternal economic growth’ is by shredding and wasting our social and ecological endowments.
What we have learned from the coronavirus crisis is that we are all profoundly connected. We can disconnect temporarily in order to ‘flatten the curve’ but we know that we can’t learn and love and live without connection. No individual or nation can solve this problem on their own. It is particularly alarming to me, as someone who has worked in the United Nations on and off since 1985, that there is no effective international coordination response, no emergency summit to ensure that national public health interventions, stimulus packages, border closures, etc are done in ways that do not hurt other nations.
As students of an international school, committed to international understanding, I know that you too are alarmed by this, and you know what it means. It means that we, each of us, have to make international cooperation work, and to restore capable states that invest in care and resilience, starting with our own countries.
This might be a tremendously irritating thing to hear. Particularly for you. You, like me, will have heard the mantra of youth empowerment over the last few years coming from the UN, where the Secretary-General has established an envoy for youth and says he believes in “tapping into the potential of youth”. You have been told that you are part of the biggest generation of youth in all of history. More than a few discussions I attended at the UN ended with ‘well, the youth will sort it out”. I can imagine that the notion that you have to fix problems that you did not make is grating. Worse, when you are a newcomer to policy-making, as I was when I joined UNIFEM in 2005 to work on governance, peace and security, you are repeatedly told that there is nothing that can be done, that ‘it is what it is’, that things have always been done this way and cannot change.
If there is a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that we can all see that exceptionally radical change is possible, and with staggering speed. What was absolutely out of the question 6 months ago has happened overnight. The radical drop in oil consumption, the reduction in air pollution, the provision of emergency individual payments that in effect are a minimum basic wage. Our job now is to emulate the furious advocacy of the 18 year old Emma Gonzalez, who survived the gun massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglass school in Florida in 2018, and shouted ‘We call B.S.’ on claims that it is impossible to make the urgent changes we need – to cut emissions, ban assault weapons, provide paid parental and sick leave, ensure universal health care.
Everything can change.
The question is how can YOU contribute to change.
Some of you may already know what you want to do with your life, some of you may not yet have found it, some of you may be rethinking your options in light of the pandemic. Just one thought to take with you: if you are not sure of what it is that you want to do, don’t settle on something because you think it will get you a job, or because it will earn you the praise of strangers. Try to do what you love doing.
You might not know yet what this ‘something’ is. You have a bit of time to find out. I have spent my whole career fighting for women’s rights, both as an academic and a policy-maker. I had no idea that there was a career to be had in this when I graduated in 1980. There were no classes about gender when I went to highschool, nor during my entire undergraduate degree, and nor during my master’s degree. But I discovered my vocation when working in a junior position for the United Nations Development Program in Chad – in the mid-1980s. One of the projects I managed was an agricultural training program. All the people learning about growing maize and sorghum and millet were men. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that most of the farming and marketing in that country was done by women. On pointing this out, I was told ‘it is what it is’ and ‘this is how things are done’. Why? It turned out that women were left out because of domestic chores, childcare and a lack of basic literacy. No one considered obvious adjustments like teaching farming techniques in villages close to women’s homes instead of the capital city, or providing on-site childcare. Since, then, whether I have worked on women’s access to income or women’s leadership in peace processes, I have spent my life trying to break through the ‘It is what it is’ barrier, which is just a shield to protect the preferences of the powerful.
We do not have accept the way things are just because that is how things have always been done. Whatever you do next, you can hold leaders to account for building more humane systems out of this crisis. When I was first asked to give this talk, it was back in December. Wildfires were consuming Australia. The situation called for accelerated global climate action, but nothing happened. This pandemic is different. It is unfolding in space and time in a different way from other crises. Most natural disasters or wars — like fires or tsunamis or insurgencies — are limited to specific geographic spaces that are far from most of us. But this crisis is everywhere. It is also not limited to a specific time. Fires burn out after a while. The Asian tsunami ebbed away. The September 11 attacks happened on just one day. But with COVID-19, we don’t know how long this will take. This gives us the chance to move from emergency reactions to structural change.
Let me leave you with a quote from Dag Hammarskjold, former UN secretary-general, a quote that is carved into stone on the ground across the street from the UN:
“Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions”.
Your own experience, right now, most of you in lockdown somewhere, none of you graduating cheek by jowl with your peers, tells you that you are in a very special graduating class. Trust your own perceptions and convictions in whatever you do next. To quote Malala Yousafzai, who, by the way, is missing her own graduation from Oxford University: ‘..we think we are too young, or our ideas may not work, and we need to grow up to bring change. I just say no, Whatever you want to do now, you can do it now’.
You don’t have to wait to make a difference. Remember, as the anti-war activist Cynthia Enloe reminds us: “‘Later’ is a patriarchal time zone”.
And one other thing: re-asses every person, every process, everything you have been taking for granted. Think about what is essential and don’t put off giving respect and recognition. Thank your parents and teachers. One day soon you will see your friends again, you might be able even to hug them. You know how essential that is. And how sweet that will be from now on.
Congratulations, class of 2020!