University of Southern Maine

Paige Emily Eclov's Commencement Address

Listen to Eclov's address

Good morning to family, friends, faculty and staff.  Congratulations to my graduating class.  It is no secret that we are not graduating at the most auspicious time in history.  However, we step forward to meet this challenge leaving our naïve perceptions behind with new knowledge and perspectives from our education at USM.  Though the future in this economy will be wrought with hardship there is a depth of opportunity open for us.

Coming to USM for me was somewhat of a fluke.  Halfway through my years at a small private school in Minnesota I took an anxious look at what lay before me; a possible impending marriage, a career that held little passion, and a detachment from the greater world I dreamed so deeply of affecting.  The debilitating confusion about the future, a glaring uncertainty about my own potential and a lack of direction was enough to spur action.  So I fled.

I quickly discovered that even the distance from Minnesota to Maine was not enough to cure me.  So I settled in and tried to convince myself I had made the right decision in leaving.  It wasn’t until a required economics class that I began to realize the framework that would house my good intentions to connect and affect the world.  My miracle started here, in Luther Bonney with a professor that looked me in the eyes and told me that I was bound for greatness, that I had untapped potential.  He led me out of that narrow room into a world of possibility, sweetness and hope, that I would have a place in.

Since then I have delved into the world of economics, policy and social responsibility with a renewed hope that this will be that centering passion, that through these ideas I can fashion a deep connection with my community.  I dropped my half-hearted inclinations in favor of this kaleidoscope of opportunity.  Since then I have been talking, reading, listening, watching the beauty and complexity unfold.

I have realized that progress has come at the expense of pervasive fragmentation.  We are a lonely nation living in wild pursuit of economic prosperity and have lost a part of our humanity defining ourselves as such.  We are comfortable with a culture of convenience at any expense and operate without an understanding that we are defined a great deal by the least of us.  We must realize that the status quo isn’t justified by anything moral, but has been normalized by our often mindless acceptance of it.

There is no more poignant time to realize the limitations of American individualism, as we step forward, with our new education in hand ready and able to leave our mark on a depressed economy in a broken world.  The real question that has emerged is: what kind of a mark shall we seek to leave, and how can we together go about trying to remake a broken society into one worth living in and being proud of.

We must seek to be aware of the reality under the façade.  Only then can we let those understandings lead us to step further and seek to make small contributions to our society.  Together we can respect and value our caregivers, seek truth behind media slants, curb our appetite for fast meals and learn to sit down, enjoy each other and find ways to encourage community.  We can turn from a bottomless consumer appetite to rebuild and appreciate the intangible gifts that are borne of acting together and supporting each other.

We are all interdependent and not so different from each other as we would like to think.  In order to honor and respect each other and continue to fight for a better world we must hold onto the thread of hope in community and in higher education and never fail to recognize the worth and possibilities in contributing to society.  Though I don’t know what this means for me for next year or the year after that, may it be seeking my Masters in Public Policy or getting involved in community activism I know that I have the power to not only choose and form my own future, but that those decisions affect the larger society in which I belong and have responsibility.  I hope that all of you in this new season will likewise embrace this rich opportunity.  I thank you all and wish you only the very best.

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