A generation ago, our class valedictorian said about what everybody thought he’d say. It came out in fine, rolling English sentences—all of which we had heard before. I don’t recall a thing he said.

Last Sunday night, I attended the Baccalaureate (the last one) at Drexel High School. The occasion was the same as in 1928, the graduates the same age, the smiles and tears the same bittersweet mixture. But I will not forget what the two class speakers said—Kenneth Mannings, who gave a perceptive and graceful farewell to a school that was saying goodbye to him too, and Reginia Rogers, who began her brief but keen analysis of the American teenager with the words, “It’s as if we had just been invented.”

I tried to put Reginia’s words into comments in a dialogue with the complaining, criticizing world of adults. It came out like this:

Adults: I can’t imagine what’s the matter…they’re so different.

Reginia: Well, we are different-different because we have one foot in the doorway to life. We are half-grown up.

Adults: They don’t seem to know what they’re doing.

Reginia: All our activities, thoughts and hopes, are happening in preparation for the new “us” that will emerge in the near future as full-fledged adults.

Adults: We do everything for them.

Reginina: Sometimes adults overprotect us by closing around us an environment so carefully planned that difficulties never arise.

‘But We Love Them’

Adults: We want to spare them the rough experiences we had in our lives.

Reginia: But we must have these experiences if we are to face life successfully. We don’t want this affectionate over protection. We don’t want to feel abused and sorry when difficulties come our way. We desire a love that does not deny us these difficulties, but does keep them from being overwhelming.

Adults. But the teen-ager is so immature.

Reginia: Maturity is our goal. And one of the first steps toward it is to recognize that other people are human too, with problems, idiosyncrasies, hopes and desires. We should express ourselves locally, clearly, reasonably. We should not fight authority simply because it is authority. That would only make us “rebels without a cause.”

Adults: You must go out and make the world a better place.

Reginia: But other adults once said that to these adults too. We cannot vote yet and the only force we have is our individuality. We are suppose to be mature and young; independent and obedient; competitive and easy-going. It’s hard to be a true individual –to find courage to dare to be different-and sometimes to dare not to be different.

American conformity

Adults: Why can’t teen-agers be like everybody else?

Reginia: We have seen some of us and many adults trying to live like “the crowd.” That is not for us. We do not want to miss out on all the fun of taking a chance, or the satisfaction of true accomplishment. We want to be persons in the full sense of the word.

Adults: But the beards and the peaceniks and the dancing!

Reginia: Tomorrow we will join PTA meetings, executive training programs and picket lines in roughly the same proportion as the generation we succeed. Our parents had their crazy fads once, and they grew up all right. We’ll come out of it all right, too.

‘Deep Inside Us’

Reginia closed with a fervent plea to reasonable adults that “we count, every inch of us.” If the 30 graduates remember her final, prayerful summary, this will be a better world because Christ our Lord will bless their hope:

“Our potential is there, deep inside of us, waiting to be used. We should strive earnestly to find this way to our inner self…, to grow…to shine.”

I believe that most of our high school graduates profess this deep conviction. That is why I trust young people, and proclaim the Church that welcomes them as today’s citizens.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta