The world beyond
Toolbox
Published: June 14, 2007
Andy Cunningham opened eyes at Rutland High School's commencement ceremony on Tuesday, and Rutland's graduating seniors got a good lesson in life after Rutland.
Cunningham was the commencement speaker, invited back only three years after he graduated from Rutland High School. He is a student at Duke University, and he used his moment in front of the graduating class to remind them of the broad horizons that await them.
Cunningham has traveled widely since he left Rutland. He has helped found a secondary school for girls in Kenya and has studied for a semester in China. He has been a patient in a Calcutta hospital and has had a meal at a shelter in the Bronx.
It is a large world. Cunningham's words helped to drive home the point that the most profound education can sometimes happen by shaking yourself loose from your comfortable surroundings for a glimpse of how others live.
Much has been made in recent years of the need to make Vermont an attractive place for young Vermonters to go to school and settle down. It is important to the state's future that new opportunity be available to Vermonters and to people from out of state looking for an accommodating, prosperous and cultural lively place to make their homes.
Cunningham was making a different point — that Vermonters need not be hemmed in by narrow horizons, that the world awaits them and, even more important, the world needs them.
We need not indulge the illusion that Americans can save the world. China and India are immense burgeoning empires that are making enormous progress on their own.
But America is part of the world, and Vermont is part of America. And it is important to remember that America is the richest nation on earth and that progress toward human dignity and economic prosperity in places as diverse as China and Kenya remains intimately tied to the realms of technology, finance, commerce, and politics that find America at the center.
Young people such as Andy Cunningham who venture forth into the larger world gain as much or more than they contribute. Exposure to other ways of life is humbling and eye-opening and is the best preventative against the arrogance and ignorance that so easily lead us astray.
Going far from home need not threaten or undermine life in Vermont. Young people who have been away are likely to appreciate all the more acutely the humane values, the human scale, and the gentle landscape of Vermont after experiencing the challenges faced by people in more troubled places. At the same time, anyone who travels to other places is likely to be astonished at the resilience of people elsewhere who are facing challenges far greater than anything now facing the people of Vermont.
People from away who settle in Vermont are sometimes envious of Vermonters whose families have been here for generations, who are tied closely to the land and who have extended families all around them. And yet many of those extended families have sent young people far and wide to experience the world in all its challenging variousness.
To be rooted in Vermont and to experience the wondrous world — combining these two is something that to which young Vermonters ought to aspire.
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