Good visit, troubling outlooks

My two grandsons happily came visiting over the Memorial Day weekend. Trevor, who brought along his delightful girlfriend, Nina, works for a San Francisco radio station and does disc jockey gigs on the side. He mixes music so well that he is in constant demand for clubs and parties, a talent I first encountered in the basement of his home in Boulder, Colo. and never quite got in sync with.

Duke Ellington it ain’t.

Trent came directly from his graduation ceremonies at George Washington University in the nation’s capitol, still bewildered by a commencement program that ? he told me ? wandered between revenge on activist graduates and a sitcom skit. According to his report, supported by his parents, who were there, the university president used this occasion to attack student critics of his administration in a speech that made up in malevolence what it lacked in inspiration.

The sitcom skit ? which might better be called “The Mom and Pop Show” ? consisted of patter between Barbara Bush and George the Elder. Trent insists that his lack of enthusiasm at this performance has nothing to do with political bias, only with the inappropriateness of booking such an act to a graduation ceremony at a university that could command virtually any political star in Washington.

It has been some years since I have seen both boys at the same time, and it was especially rewarding because they played off each other in offering insights into their lives and thinking that probably wouldn’t have emerged otherwise. The feeling of exchanging views with contemporary adults I happen to love very much was stimulating and exciting.

And saddening. Not because they don’t have strong views about what is happening in their country today, but because they don’t feel they can do anything about it and are looking in other directions to satisfy a strong sense of social awareness.

Trent, especially. His degree is in international relations, and he has much to offer in that field. His language skills, in particular, would be extremely useful to American corporations and our own State Department, but these aren’t the directions in which he is looking.

He spent his junior year studying in Brazil and will return there after exploring other parts of South America until his funds are exhausted, trying to decide where and how he wants to put down.

That’s the way it should be when you are 22-years-old and free of any encumbrances beyond personal survival. Trent is deeply engaged with both the promise and the poverty in Brazil and would like to be involved in dealing with both. And sadly, to me, he feels he can be more effective there than he can in his own country right now.

He tells me that many of his fellow graduates feel the same way ? a kind of hopelessness at putting a dent in the powerful forces that President Dwight Eisenhower once warned us about, and which he called “the military-industrial complex.” Trevor strongly shares this pessimistic view.

If I had been invited to deliver a graduation speech to Trent’s classmates, I would have tried very hard to engage them with the problems in their own country. To point out to them that great pockets of poverty exist in the United States, and that a growing gap between the haves and have-nots in this country is a serious and festering problem that needs to be addressed just as critically as the social problems this year’s graduates see in other parts of the world.

And especially I would say to them that the election coming up in November is one of the most critical in my long lifetime because it will focus on control of our Congress and decide whether the Bush administration will continue unchecked in its policies through the next two years. Far too many student voters have been out to lunch during the last two elections. They need to be voting in the next one.

I delivered this speech in my backyard over a beer or two, and the three fine young people who listened were respectful but dubious.

I gave it my best shot. Maybe three more votes will be cast as a result. Meanwhile, Sherry and I sent them off full of fried chicken, baseball ? we saw the Angels play Tuesday night ? a lethal Brazilian drink called cachaca, a riotous poker game and lots of good talk.

They left behind with us a cornucopia of warm memories.