Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale's Commencement Address at Northern Vermont University

Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale’s Commencement Address as Delivered at Northern Vermont University

Thank you, President Mills. Thank you all for the warm Lyndon welcome. It’s an honor to join the graduates in expressing gratitude to the family and friends, the faculty and staff who have helped them arrive here today ready to take the next step on their journey. More than anything, Class of 2022, it is my privilege to address you. To congratulate you. To invite you to look around and soak this in…

You are not on Zoom and you are not just getting through today to finish packing. You are here. IRL. You have arrived. You have gotten through what must have felt like insurmountable uncertainty and upheaval. And maybe you have even begun to figure out what thriving looks like in the chaos of this moment, when it feels like everything is being reorganized and reordered from the governance of this campus to our everyday realities on this planet.

So while we celebrate today, we should also pause to recognize that we are in a confusing cycle of rebirth that follows death. The flag is at half staff because one million Americans have died from the coronavirus and left behind so many loved ones to pick up the pieces.

As I’ve thought about what to say, the world has kept changing. I thought about grounding us in what is most constant – the sun, the moon, the periodic table, the speed of light. I thought about speaking to the power of great events of disorder. The two events in recorded history that most greatly reduced income inequality were the Black Plague and World War II. The assassination of President Kennedy threw a nation into mourning and solidified a new coalition with the political will to advance the Civil Rights Movement. Many of your ancestors fled unpredictability and great suffering to give you the opportunity to be here, able to live through uncertain times in the beauty of this place and with the community of one another. We have felt existential threat before and, truly, the only constant is change.

So we strive through the chaos and disorder to create moments like these to celebrate and to reflect. We hold ceremony, we dip in cold rivers to feel alive together, we replace flags that hold meaning far beyond their fabric. And most importantly, we learn, we grow, and we make meaning where none would otherwise exist.

I usually try to have three pieces of sage, coherent advice and tie it up in a bow at the end, but you’re going to have to bear with me. Perhaps because the legislative session ended a mere 60 hours ago, my brain woke me up in the middle of the night asking the most basic questions we have at our disposal – who, what, where, when, and why?

The who in this case is you, my dear graduates. And you are one step further on your journey of figuring out who exactly you are. There are a few thoughts about who you are that I would offer. First, you will always be figuring that out, and there is deep joy and deep pain in revealing new parts of yourself. But it is the stuff of life.

Second, it will happen at incredibly unexpected times. I remember, in 2016, during my first run for statewide office, I followed Senator Patrick Leahy and Attorney General TJ Donovan at a large political rally at the Old Labor Hall in Barre. For some reason, our speakers had begun to outdo each other in terms of their Irish Catholic roots, and I was up next. I took a deep breath and my mind went blank, and then I said, “Well, I’m not Irish Catholic, but I did grow up in my Indian immigrant father and Jewish American mother’s Irish pub in Los Angeles.” The crowd lost their minds, and just like that, deep into my political career and my young adult life, adrenaline and hard cider helped me turn what had felt like an unspeakably complex background into a true American story.

Finally, in terms of who you are, it is helpful to know what makes you your best self – and then keep practicing it. There are a lot of graduation speeches that talk about making your bed or wearing sunscreen. It can be any number of things that ensure your body not only doesn’t sabotage your success, but is your partner in achieving that success. For me, it’s sleep. I have gotten eight hours of sleep nearly every night since I was in college. It’s perhaps the only consistent thing I’ve had in my life, and it is the thing that has made me most productive in the other hours of the day. So when you think of who you are, don’t leave your body behind.

Next, the what of your life. This might be the hardest question to answer, especially as you begin this journey into adulthood in a changing world with an evolving reality about the nature of work. Thankfully, the Japanese have us covered on this one with the concept of Ikigai. The traditional Japanese philosophy around Ikigai focuses on finding your bliss, and a more western interpretation has used it as a methodology of finding your dream career. Hopefully it can serve as one in the same in your life.

Your Ikigai sits at the center of: What you love, What you’re good at, What you can be paid for, and What the world needs. And, of course, no one can tell you what you love, and there is always room to be good at things and find a way to be paid for them. But I can tell you what the world needs. In the words of Howard Thurman, the world needs you to ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
And that leads us to the where. Where do you come alive? It’s a question we don’t ask ourselves enough. Maybe for you it’s on a moonlight hike with your classmates and President Mills or staring out at Lake Willoughby on a misty day. As a politician in Vermont, I’m not doing my job unless I ask you to please stay here and go about your business of coming alive. You see, I was not lucky enough to be born a Vermonter, but I was smart enough to become one.

I had heard of this romantic place called Vermont with covered bridges, rolling hills, and clean air. What really sealed the deal, however, was a National Public Radio story about a certain dog chapel in this brave little state in the town of St. Johnsbury. As I was making my college decisions, I thought, perhaps the people who worship dogs on mountainsides have figured it out – and I should join them. That said, I still didn’t have the right clothes or know how to brave the weather. When I told my family I needed something called Gortex to live in New England, my sister was convinced that was a Harry Potter character. I wore hoop earrings and platform boots into the woods as a Natural Resources student at UVM, and no one thought I would stay.

And not just stay, but look in the eyes of all of my neighbors after graduation and ask to serve them in the legislature. Let me get this straight, one neighbor asked – you’re from Hollywood, and you moved here, and you want to stay here, you don’t mind the winters, and you want to be our legislator at 22? You sound nutty enough to be a Vermonter, so you have my vote.

When I challenged incumbents for a seat in the legislature, we were staring down what looked like a bleak future, as well. The Great Recession was looming as the ink was drying on our diplomas in 2008. I ran for the legislature without health care as a renter and was openly told I didn’t care enough about the community without owning a home. My opponents acted as if I had no right to run. I was called a “kitten with lipstick,” and they said they’d be curious to know what I thought I brought to the table. So, I knocked on every door twice, registered hundreds of new voters, doubled my opponent’s vote count, and won by the largest margin of any challenger in the state that year, becoming the youngest legislator in the country that year.

More importantly, I soon came to realize where I was had so much to do with what felt possible. I knew my neighbors, I had a sense of place and community, and that made all the difference. In fact, people who are thinking about elected office often ask me if they should run where they grew up or where they went to school or where it might be easiest. My answer is to run and serve where you want to be buried. Where you want the impact of your efforts to be felt long after you’re gone. Any type of service, be it elected or not, is hard work and often thankless work. Be where you know deep in your bones it matters, because one day all that will be left is your bones and the impact you had on your place and the people who call it home.

Now, when is the easiest part. With the fiercest urgency of now. And for as long as it takes. The world needs you right now in no uncertain terms. It also needs your sustained contributions, so find that balance. But do not hesitate to give your gift to the world. It is needed and appreciated. And in the words of the great Dr. King, “The time is always right to do what is right.” The world may not accept your gifts right away, but that does not mean you give up.

Sometimes you won’t succeed. You won’t double your opponent’s vote count and the door you pushed on will swing back and knock you down instead. The arc of the moral universe will wobble when you bend it. I was proud to be the first woman of color to earn double digits in a statewide race in Vermont, but I lost in 2016. And I had left everything on the table, I had no energy or fight left in me. Governor Madeleine Kunin, who I am fortunate to have as a guiding light in my life, was very practical in her advice after that. She shrugged and said, “When I lost my race, I went to the Kennedy School and got a master’s degree.” Fair enough. So I did that, and came back, and became the first woman of color to serve in the State Senate four years later.

In fact, I resolved that it was finally time for Vermont to pass an environmental justice bill that I had first introduced in 2007. 15 years later, we were still not addressing disparities in environmental burdens and benefits. Mobile home communities are still flooding, children are experiencing lead poisoning, migrant farmworkers still do not have healthy working and living conditions. So I set out to renew that effort, and we passed Vermont’s first environmental justice legislation with a bipartisan vote in both the House and Senate this year. I tried to explain to the 13-year-old pages who assist us in the State House that I had been working on the bill for longer than they were alive, and that it was still worth it. Find the work that makes you always feel like the time is right and those years will fly by quickly and joyfully.

And so, why? Why do any of this in a world on fire? In a world that is unequal and unfair? Why replace a flag that was taken down? Why put a flag up in the first place? I can’t answer that question for you, but I can say I believe deeply in our sacred obligation to leave this world just a little better off than we found it. A little more just, a little more green. To live in a way that honors the three generations before us that fought, risked everything, and sometimes lost their lives for our right to vote, our ability to live peacefully, our ability to earn more than our parents. And the three generations that will come after, who we want to be able to experience the beauty of this world, the dignity of personal autonomy and freedom, and the power of collective governance we know as democracy – before it’s too late.

That leads us to perhaps the most persistent question of our time – How? How do we heal this division in our nation and world that comes from a sense of scarcity? Scarcity of resources, of power, of access. How do we get out of the echo chambers that are making us build our own walls and wage our own wars in our families and in our communities? The only answer is together.

Nature tries to give us so many examples of interconnectedness. Whether we like it or not, we share the same planet and the same fate. Many indigenous communities still know this intuitively and from story. The Abenaki people, the keepers of this land we stand on, have the same word for community as they do for watershed. It is wolhanak, and it essentially means “bowl.” Trickling streams feed into rushing rivers, enough water can shape stone, and drops of rain form lakes and oceans.

A mentor of mine in the legislature from the Republican Party would say, “You may be in the majority, but we are all in the same boat. So if we’re all doing our job, then the majority steers the ship, but the minority points out the rocks.” That always stuck with me as a way to keep division from taking root in my heart and in my work.

When we think about survival in a moment like this, the mighty Sequoia of the west might give us the best example of all. They are majestic trees that seemingly touch the sky. They are among the tallest and largest living things on earth, and they have been standing for millenia. But you will never find one alone. When one finally topples over, you see its roots are shallow, because they do not dig down, they reach out and intertwine with the roots of the trees beside them. They can only grow together, in community.

So remember, this is your wolhanak, your community. Whatever you do lifts up or brings down the others among you. From the smallest drop of water to the largest living thing on land, there is no dividing us if we are going to survive and ultimately thrive. So go fast, go far, reach high – but honor where you came from and who helped you get here, and, in doing so, you will honor your families, your friends, your teachers, and above all, your selves and this brave little state where you had the opportunity to learn, to grow, and to make meaning in a way that I hope will last you a lifetime.

Thank you.

Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale