The Brockovich Report

President Lawton, Vice Presidents, Deans, Professors, Parents, invited guest and the Graduating Class of 2007. It is with great pride, true happiness, deep gratitude and sincere humility that I accept your invitation to be here today.

You honor me by having me here. By acknowledging what I have accomplished. The measure of my own struggles to make the world that I inherited a better place to live. My hope, my wish, my legacy to you is the achievement of my experiences. The measure of my own success was the reflection of what was my ability to learn, to apply, to grow and eventually even to succeed.

It is a joy for me to share in your moment of achievement – your commencement. Although it marks the end of your student years at Loyola Marymount, a period of time that you will look back on with fond memories, it is really the beginning. You have now been certified at the starting line to the rest of your life. You are the citizens of the 21st century. You will now represent the future. I would point out that commencement means looking ahead, to begin, to begin the greatest journey you will ever take; the journey of life.

Today, you enter a world that welcomes you just as you welcome it. A world that will change you as you will change it. The result of those changes will mark the days of your life and in the end will serve as your legacy.

This world is all at once beautiful, wondrous, mysterious and inspiring. It is also troubled, damaged, factionalized and yes, it is in danger.

Your mission class of 2007, should you choose to accept it and I hope that you do, is to take the gift of this great planet and become its new caretakers, to bring us to a better place on our surface, in our hearts and through our shared spirits so that one day when your children are standing where you are now, your legacy to them will truly be a great one. You will have created a better world for all human kind and that is quite an accomplishment.

Your commencement marks your arrival at that starting line. This is your graduation day. Graduation: Literally it means the “marks of measurement.” The level of graduated growth and development.

Think of that wall chart your parents kept when you were a child. Remember those marks somewhere on your parent’s kitchen wall? My children’s marks are still on the wall and every day I look at them, I smile. Even though their marks are now taller than mine, it reminds me and them just how far we have come. Each time you grew an inch or so, it was noted by that mark. A mark that showed you how much you had grown. A graduated measure of your success. Today, you graduate with a measure of how far your mind has come. How much you have learned. How much you understand. How far you have come up against that great wall of life, against which we are all constantly being measured.

As I look back at the great wall of life, what did I learn? Well, or one thing I learned that success doesn’t always mean winning and failure doesn’t always mean losing. Going up against the Goliaths of industry I learned that being David can be pretty sweet. I discovered when I took on industry that there was great value in being the little guy or gal as it were. If for no other reason, any victory I had would have to be enormous simply by the fact of its own unlikely happening. In fact, taking on the establishment USUALLY means losing.

However, it is the act itself, of taking them on, of standing up against the odds for what one believes is right guaranteed that I could not lose for winning. As it happened my education was taken in the great “University of Living.” I earned my degree in failing. I finally graduated the day that I realized the measure of my own accomplishment.

That was the day, as a human being I first saw that something was morally wrong in the world in which I was living and bringing up my very own children.

If you saw the movie Erin Brockovich, then you know that in the course of my ordinary everyday existence, working at a law firm, going through the materials of a case that I had no business looking at, my commonsense, my humanity made me begin to realize that something was wrong. People were dying, numbers weren’t adding up and nobody was doing anything about it. It wasn’t anything factually specific that I found it was just a feeling I had that something was wrong. No lightning bolts of self righteousness hit me but things just didn’t feel right and I needed to know what was wrong and why. That was the commencement of my real journey. Later on, taking on the industrial establishment and wanting to do something about it became my goal.

What I learned from the famous case that you might know about was that I had been working my whole life to find out who I really way, what life meant to me, what the value in a simple blade of grass was and that my purpose in life was to protect it, nourish it and let it live. Each day that blade of grass lived so did I and so did we all.

There is a blade of grass in each of us. It is in a metaphorical sense; the children that we must protect, the disenfranchised that we must help. It is the poor, the underprivileged, it is the nameless, it is the faceless and it is also the endless. It is God’s Garden, it is you and it is me.

That blade of grass, as simple a life form as it may have been, was no less profound a form of life than you and me. I cannot live without that blade of grass and that blade of grass needs us ALL to survive.

That’s all that the movie was about. That’s really all that the case was about and that’s really what I am about. The realization of the value of life all around us, which has a Universal God given right to thrive without artificial or manmade threat, was in fact a victory no matter what the outcome was. That became my next celebration of life.

The ceremony of celebration, yet another word we use here today, is the acknowledgement of accomplishment, both individually as students and together as the class of 2007. It is a glorious accomplishment on both levels. It is a measure of your desire and mine to share our time of achievement and arrival.

Think of it as a great choral litany, the harmony of our togetherness highlighted by the individual voice of ourselves.

Don’t try to live your life in a moral, social or cultural vacuum. We depend upon each other and that dependence in a very beautiful and unexpected way frees us to be ourselves.

One of the things that I hope you have learned in your classes is one that I have learned in my life: Don’t limit the opportunities of living in search of the opportunity of a life time. The horizon is endless. Let your vision lead you to be a visionary. Don’t let others limit you and more importantly, don’t limit yourself.

Had I listened when people said you can’t, I wouldn’t have. The only voice that truly sang for me was the voice within myself, URGING me to take the COURAGE to be myself! It was the loudest voice of all, and yours must be for YOU as it will become the chorus of life.

So class of 2007, you leave here today a group of accomplished and proud graduates. You will go out into the world to seek and mark your individual places in it. Throughout your life’s journey stop and occasionally sing out with these words and thoughts:

LIVE LIFE and I mean live it! WORK! Work until you break a sweat! SET goals, aim high and hit that mark. ENDURE! Suffer without yielding. Hold OUT for what is right! Give and give some more. Question everything and don’t be afraid of the answer. Find a solution. Be the solution! Enrich others and in turn you will have enriched yourself. Show compassion, teach compassion and live with passion. Tend to the elderly. Tend to the helpless. Help others who cannot help themselves. Feel! Experience pain and sorrow! Experience triumph and love! Laugh and then laugh some more. Cry! Cry hard, cry loud and then pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back out there. Embrace loss! Embrace winning! Remember, dissention is a true form of patriotism. DISCOVER the world in which you live! Delight in it, realize it, create it, recognize it and RESPECT it, BUT most of all walk with PRIDE through this world.

Let us commence and graduate together to make a better tomorrow that will become the yesterdays and the future for us all! LIVE ON CLASS of 2007 … LIVE ON!