by French B. Bandong
Valedictorian
To:
Rev. Fr. Karel S. San Juan, of the Society of Jesus, University President
Mr. Benjamin Lizada, Chair of the Board of Trustees
Ms. Jamela Aisha Alindogan, our Honored Guest and Commencement Speaker
Rev. Fr. Antonio Basilio, of the Society of Jesus, Vice President for Higher Education
To our Respected School Deans, The Registrar, Administrators, Faculty, and Staff
To our Beloved Parents, Loved Ones, and Friends
To My Fellow Graduates,
Good Morning.
To write this speech on behalf of all graduates was a huge honor. On top of this is the responsibility to deliver a speech that can encapsulate not just the journey we have been through but also of the task of making sense of this Jesuit education. Every time I attempt to write, with the thought of framing it as inspirational, I find myself doom scrolling on tiktok. I look at valedictory speeches, check my viral tiktok post, and then I scroll down again and I see a tiktok explainer on impeachment proceedings and constitutional interpretations. Then I scroll down again and I come across viral graduation transitions and dances that some of you are perhaps preparing to do after this ceremony. Then scroll down again and it’s about PBB and Encantadia. Again and you see bombings and missile launches.
How do you make an inspirational speech in the middle of a livestreamed genocide and of a potential nuclear war.
These days, our empathy can become rare. If not rare, it becomes quick. It’s a loop of short lived emotions. We care, we are sad, and then we scroll and move on from what we just visualized. We are overwhelmed. Yet despite this overwhelming state we are in, somehow we find a way to still be hopeful. I figure, it is also during these troubling times that one finds strength: from nations that resist being erased, and from people that insist to exist.
I have questions for our graduates and everyone:
1. Who among you had to cut off and unfriend mutuals on facebook because you did not like their political stance?
2. Who among you had to cry because you got frustrated with an election result?
3. Who among you fought with your parents (or children) because the dinner conversation became a heated political debate?
Politics can be a sensitive subject for the majority of us. But I am here to talk about it anyway. Not just because I am a Political Science student, but because, for all its worth, politics is necessary. Some say that you can separate the political from the personal. That can be correct. But those who are able to separate their personal lives to their political opinions are those that are privileged enough to not become the collateral for these political choices. Those are the ones that do not need to make ends meet. But for a lot of us, politics is deeply personal.
Today, we see that there is so much passion, anger, and frustration when people engage in politics. That is where it reflects how much people really care. But lately, we have lost our moral obligation towards caring for others.
Personality politics have isolated and polarized us. It has removed political participation rooted in our shared identity. Now, it becomes MY identity. It results in heightened individualism, and at all times it favors fascists, dictators, and populists. Fascism flourishes when you stop caring about people.
Mockery is also a tool for injustice. We tag people as uneducated, when it is our kind of politics that excludes. We make fun of people engaged in politics like activists who scream and cry and skip school to rally in streets, when their only fault is their passion to care deeply.
All these things paralyze us. We feel that politics is toxic, draining, and dirty when at the heart of it are people and their pursuit for social justice. All of us want things to work and make things right.
We must remind ourselves that when we distance away from politics, injustice flourishes. All of us fall victims to injustice. So as toxic as it may be, as irrelevant as we think politics is to our careers, we must confront politics and if we are to do so, we must be prepared to be inconvenienced.
To build a more just and democratic society, we must also push back against rhetoric that devalues our humanity. Some things must be a concession: That killing for politics is never justified.
The situation in Gaza is a case of illegal occupation, annexation, and genocide. A lot of us has diluted this genocide because it is apparently complex and reserves a more professional and diplomatic anlysis. But in doing so, we lose how politics is meant to preserve humanity. You may write and talk about these things in history books, but our institutions will be judged by how they responded to the moral crisis of today. Those who are silent in the face of atrocities will have questionable rights to lecture a generation. To overly intellectualize yet dehumanize our conception of these issues is a failure all together.
Some over intellectualize politics as if everything is subjective but also highly exclusive. Politics is not reserved for political scientists. Many aspects of our future careers are dependent on political decisions, our capacity to even make a career with our degrees is dependent on a system set up by politics. We, like any other people in this room, are active participants, both affecting and contributing. At the moment, our conception of politics is that it is only situated in formal institutions like the government. Some of us are privileged enough to have access to that power because of our jobs, positions, and companies and therefore we think politics concerns us less. But for the most vulnerable and marginalized, they not only become victims of abuse of power, they are also exploited and robbed of the most essential things to live: education, food, dignity, justice among others.
We need to decentralize our understanding of power not just because it concerns us, but because it is our moral obligation towards others. To be true persons for others, our conception of politics must be measured by how the least of us are doing, and not the best of us.
Never stop caring and being passionate. Do not allow people to discredit your idealism because the world we have right now needs more of it. It needs more of people who believe that there is some good in this society. We need to reimagine a world that does not only see us as a follower of a structure that only exploits our vulnerabilities. Lead within our own industries, run for office, join conversations. We need a counterculture that radically loves even to our most opposite neighbors, and radically hopes even at the most troubling times.
As a generation that has overcome a global pandemic and still managed to be here, we need to maintain that space of optimism and hope: we build a culture that rejects individualism and pessimism.
Hold on to the resilience of our parents who have worked so hard to send us here. Our teachers and professors who taught, formed, and guided us to become who we are today.
Hold on to situations that exemplify hope: of young people that come together to insist on good governance, of environmental activists that oppose the destruction of our common home despite going against multi billion corporations, of the people of Palestine who continue to insist on their right to exist, of the strength of the Bangsamoro and Mindanao people who continue to push against marginalization and neglect.
Hold on to the courage of those who came before us who challenged our systems, stood up and resisted domination and oppression. Who sounded the alarm, who disturbed us with our privileges.
Friends,
Engage in a Politics of Hope
Engage in a Politics of Resistance
Engage in politics as if your life depends on it, because it does.
Thank you and maayong buntag.
