He told the students that he wasn't going to give them the usual platitudes, then snuck in some when he talked about how they weren't going to listen to platitudes anyway. (he fears the day when text messaging makes it so that the entire English language is expressed using letters that can be typed with our thumbs.) That was funny, but the serious stuff was that he said that _we_ (old folks) need to learn from _them_. They were the ones who had to fix global warming and a bunch of other things (on the left-liberal Democratic Party agenda). His nod to the immigrant issue was reading the poem from the Statue of Liberty. The only downer was the knee-jerk reference to "genocide" in Darfur. An excellent speaker over all.
some GOP types among the parents and students walked out in disgust. -- Jim Devine / "Sanity is a madness put to good use." -- George Santayana.