Hello, friends.
What a week this has been! One of the last real weeks of the 2024-2025 school year. I’m bogged down in grading but I’m getting through. This coming week is the last five-day week. Three of the five days are for finals so the students will only be there half the day. Then next Monday will finally be the last day of school.
I also was dealing with trying sell a truck for my father, who doesn’t really want to sell it but kinds needs to. I think that’s worked out now (fingers crossed) and soon that will be one less thing I’ll have to worry about with him. We’re planning on moving him out of his current apartment soon.
Being Mr. Gauthier, son, Dad, and husband took a lot out of me this week. Standing for four hours at graduation last night (I’m writing this on Saturday) knocked me out. I’m still sore.
Anyway, let’s go.
Welcome to the 125th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and my wish for the class of 2025.
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I wrote just over 2,000 words on Project: Moons this week. I didn’t get to work on it Thursday because my father was driving me crazy about something and I was upset, and I didn’t get to work on it Friday because of graduation. Right now, the project is at 7,700 words, about 33 pages.
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As I stood doing my graduation duty1 at the high school I work at, I thought about what I’d say to the class of 2025 if I were asked to speak at a graduation ceremony. After reading this, you’ll probably understand why I probably wouldn’t be invited.
🎓
Class of 2025, congratulations. You were the first freshman class to come in after hybrid teaching because of the Covid-19 and you were one of my last classes of actual high school students. The actual last class of high school students will graduate next year, but since I’m shaky on what next year may look like, let’s go with it. You may also be the last American class to graduate. You’ve made history. Congrats.
I’d love to give you the inspiring speeches so many classes before you heard, with the same banalities of how you’ve worked hard to get here and that if you continue to work hard you will reap great success and you’ll be going out into a world that needs you. I really, really would love to tell you that.
But…
Yes, you’ve worked hard to get here. Well, some of you have. Certainly the students who have given you speeches tonight have, and those graduating with honors have, and so have many of the rest, but you and I both know that many of you got by with sheer luck. I hear you yelling and screaming in the hallways because you think it’s funny. I hear how you didn’t care and how you pushed through not by working hard but by having enough pull in a system that’s afraid to get sued that you got through. Some of you will continue playing the systems and continue to be successful as a result. The precedent has been set, just look at the President.
If you work hard you will reap great success. Some of you will. Some of you are from families that are already in a really good place and they’ll help you. Some of you will break free from the systemic racism and failure that has plagued your families and communities and you will succeed as a result. Most of you are going into the same rigged game as the rest of us. If you’re a young White man, then you’ll have an easier time but, depending on your socioeconomic background, that’s just barely. The game is, as I said, rigged against you. You will struggle. The goal posts will keep being moved back. If you had the cultural literacy you should, I’d use Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown as a metaphor but only a few will get it. The adults will. Most of them, anyway. But because education became about passing tests and becoming robots, so many of you won’t get that reference that I won’t make it.
You will have to work harder than your parents and certainly harder than your grandparents to get less than what they got. Sure, they’ll tell you that they made less than you but they also didn’t have the world you’re getting.
Finally, you’ll be going out into a world that needs you. This is true. Right now, the United States of America is slipping into fascism–or has already done so–and we need you to help make things right. I know it’s not fair. The same generation who fought for equal rights and to stop a war somehow became the very things they hated when they were your age. They took the system that helped their parents get them there and exploited it so that now none of us can use it. We need you to ensure that everyone has a chance and that everyone can live their best lives. We need you not to fall into the trap that my generation and the one before ours did and we need to stop looking for perfection in your leaders and start looking for best intentions and the ability to see those intentions through. Your parents may not have liked the email lady but she knew what she was going and would’ve been better for us than what we got. Same with Kamala Harris.
And for you young people sitting here upset by what I say because you’ve been hoodwinked by YouTubers into believing that your straight, White, male rights are being taken away, maybe take the Airpods out of your skull and listen in history class. Maybe understand that you’ve been played, some by teachers in this building, standing here in this field, with bumper stickers on their vehicles proudly showing off that they voted for fascism, deportation, and continued dismantling of the education system we’re supposed to be celebrating tonight.
You can help. You’re eighteen now. You have the ability to vote. You have the ability to use your intellect, your creativity, and your love to help stop this. I say this because I’ve seen the best of so many of you and I know that you can help. I know that you can change things.
We need your help.
Congratulations on reaching the end of this chapter of your lives and beginning the next. I’m proud of you. I wish we had a better world for you to go into. I guess you’ll just have to help make it so.
Thank you.
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- Heh-heh. Duty. ↩︎
Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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