I recently attended my 50th high school reunion in order to catch up with old friends and to rediscover a precious part of my youth. Before that reunion, I dug out my dusty yearbook, a document as dated as a sealed time capsule. As I thumbed those pages and looked at all those ancient pictures, I was startled by the size of the fins on cars and by the ridiculous outfits of the day, which now are perfect at a costume party. But back then we thought we were “cool.” We thought we were at the cutting edge of modernity. We were sure we lived in a new era, one dramatically different from that of our parents, much less our grandparents. We were endlessly optimistic, even buoyant, and willfully dismissive of authority and the past. We had no sense then that we were living in a time which now is chronicled on late, late movies.

Class of '07 -- your yearbook, the Opticon, will have the same very odd life cycle. In 2057, you will dig out your book from its “Sleepy Hollow” trance and thumb its pages anew. Your children will giggle at the quaintness of your clothes, the ridiculousness of your hairstyles, and the archaic Ipods and the simple minded computers of 2007. Today's DVDs will be the 78 rpm records of my youth. They will need exotic machinery to be played.

The college I attended also makes a big deal of reunions. It puts the graduating class together with both the 25 th and 50 th reunion alumni. All these classes march one after the other making the symbolic point that the generations are tied one to the other. Those seemingly ancient people back for their twenty-fifth when I graduated did not look so old when I returned for my twenty-fifth. And how young those graduating students will seem when I go back for my 50th. So it will be in 2057 when you revisit here and reread your yearbook. I can promise that.

Many things change but some things will stay the same. If there is much of what is often labeled “progress” in the years ahead, there will also be verities that are immutable. To know what to slough off and what to hold onto tightly is the trick of living.

I know you will not remember what this fusty college president said as he granted your degree -- nor should you -- but I know that everyone here at the University hopes that in 2057 you will be content with your life. We pray that you will be able to cherish that which is beautiful, and to find both an ethical and moral North Star from now to then. All of us here today hope that you can truly come to love others as you love yourself, that you can be at peace with your own success (or lack of it) and that you, individually, and that your generation, collectively, can find serenity. May your Long Island University education allow you to appreciate not only our culture and this time but those of other societies and times. Finally, we pray that you will have found the maturity to know right from wrong, and, the willingness to defend your ideals and those of free and democratic society.

To be educated is a precious gift. Use it wisely and well, not only for your own advancement but for those around you. And if you do, you will suddenly realize that you are inexorably linked to those earlier generations irrespective of the material or cultural changes documented in your dated yearbook. Then you will also appreciate how lucky you have been to be introduced to those eternal verities which this and all Universities hold sacred. The students at Virginia Tech, whose lives have been so cruelly and abruptly ended, demand no less from you.

Every commencement I close these remarks by citing that postmodern, galactic philosopher you know as Yoda. “May the force be with you.”