Good luck, graduates; some think you'll need it

Every year at this time, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them young, graduate from high schools and colleges around the country. They will listen to the usually boring and mundane commencement addresses that challenge them to take charge of their own destiny and be the best they can be. In recent years that charge has become even more fervent because of rapid social change.

The stock market lost more than a thousand points yesterday before recovering to close a little under four hundred points down.

The Arizona legislature has passed a new law that essentially makes racial profiling legal and directly contradicts the Constitutional guarantee that the government has no right to interfere in our daily lives without probable cause. Skin color is not probable cause. You can't stop and interrogate a black person because blacks, per capita, commit more crimes than whites. You can't go round up every gun in America because some people use them to hurt and kill others. And you can't come and search my house in the middle of the night just because you "think" I might be up to no good.

Tea parties and coffee parties are popping up all over the country because people are "madder than hell and they're not going to take it any more."

Birther groups have sprung up everywhere, questioning whether the President was really born in Hawaii. Interestingly, during the Presidential election, there were no similar groups questioning John McCain's birth place in the Panama Canal Zone.

Political parties and party regulars don't like the other party at all and refuse to cooperate or compromise. Politics has become a topic so overloaded with raw emotion that civility has disappeared and we can no longer agree to disagree. Consequently, it's a topic many people avoid like the plague. My friends and I can talk about girls, sports, and the weather and have good-natured disagreements but when it comes to politics, hang on to your hat because the tone changes dramatically and immediately.

People are saying we've never seen times like this before.

But we have. And we don't have to go back very far either. The '60s and early '70s were some of the most tumultuous times this country has ever faced. We were mired in an unpopular war halfway around the world using a mostly draftee army to fight the political battles of the rich and powerful. Because of that, we had large-scale and wide spread demonstrations at home with schools, colleges, and businesses being taken over by the protestors and effectively shut down for long periods of time.

We had race riots on a scale that had never been approached, either before or since. We were going through a cultural shift where young people were advised to "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" and where the mantra of many was "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." We had American soldiers shooting at and killing American citizens on American soil for the first time since the Civil War. And on top of everything else, there was the Cold War and the "bomb" which threatened the human race with annihilation at any moment.

A lot of people thought it was the end of the world; or at least the end of America. They thought we could never recover from such a revolutionary change in attitudes and behaviors.

But an amazing thing happened on the road to Armageddon.

We DID recover. In fact, we took the lessons learned from those upheavals and made America a better, fairer, more equitable place to live for ALL people, instead of just the chosen few. And we became a better country because of it. Americans have a tremendous resiliency to overcome whatever is thrown at us and to bounce back stronger than before.

So for those who think the sky is falling, I think it's not. I think we will profit and learn from the trials and tribulations we're going through this time around and end up better because of it.

Because that's what Americans do.