Excerpts from a Chapel Talk by Faye Parker ’19
It’s winter break of Junior year, I’m home from Tabor and my siblings are home from college, and the local high school’s basketball team, which both my sister Ella and I had played on, had a game. Ella was running behind schedule, which is a common occurrence, and that meant I would be driving so she could eat dinner, finish getting dressed, lay out her 10-year plan, all in the passenger seat. I had had my license for about a month, and it was literally still my permit with the “you-passed” signature scribbled on it, but, against everyone’s better judgement, especially my mum’s as she still dramatically held on to the emergency break every time I drove, I was behind the wheel on this unearthly cold December night.
Now, I want you all to know something very important: each and everyone one of you in this room, has the undeniable ability within you to total a car. I mean absolutely wreck one beyond compare, it's a pretty easy task. All it took for me was doing 20 miles per hour in a 25, a 90-degree bend, and a really cold December night. You’ve all got it in you, I believe in you, you all can or maybe even have done it.
But, I can confidently say I have little to no faith that anyone among us, besides maybe Dr. Kistler in his magic maker lab, has the ability to build a car. And I have even less faith that anyone, not even Dr. Kistler, can do it in a mere 20 seconds by adding black ice to the equation. The fact of the matter, a fact that has and always will be true, is that it is much easier to destroy than build something. The saying may be “Rome was not built in a day,” but remember, it did fall in one.
The construction versus destruction comparison came up originally in a conversation between my dad and me. We were driving home from an out of state basketball tournament and the White House had recently switched administrations. We were discussing what the new White House had done in its first months in charge. The new administration had begun to undo much of the legislation put in by the previous one, and to say the least my dad was unimpressed. As he saw it, there is nothing monumental or praiseworthy in breaking something, it doesn’t take skill or drive to undo what others have done; the real work comes with creating and developing, it comes with progressing not backtracking.
He probably only mentioned this once in our conversation but it really stuck with me, and the more I thought about it the more relevant it was. You can apply the idea to most things in life: Simply, for instance, in the effort it seems to take to raise your grade only a point or two here at Tabor, yet when you slack off, even just for second, your grade seems to drop twice as fast. Another example: relationships. Think of your closest friends and the time it took you to build the understanding and trust you share, the comfort you have around one another does not simply appear the first time you meet. Now think of a friendship you have lost, could’ve been through a disagreement or a misunderstanding, or simply: you grew apart. I know by coming to Tabor and leaving home, many of you are no longer as close with some of the people you once were, purely because it is easy to grow apart and it is easier to forgot to call and catch up and check in with one another than it is to stay in touch.
Now think about life, and what goes into creating a life, the nature and the nurture that results in someone completely separate from all others. And not just the biological aspect of it, the probability of you being born coming out to about 1 in 400 trillion, but the growth aspect and all that goes in to the human you become, all the details and choices and learning moments that develop a person, that create your life. Now, how easy is it to lose life? It's not just easy, it’s inevitable. As we have seen too often in these recent years, the pull of a trigger can end it. Think about that power: the power of one finger in one moment to end something that is the product of thousands of moments, a power I don’t think anyone should ever have. Yet, to be able to choose to destroy rather than create is a power we all have, and that, in my opinion, is terrifying.
When it comes to destruction versus construction, I would like you to consider one aspect more than the rest however: consider legacy. A legacy is created by the best and worst of people, and can be as small as it is large. When I think of creating versus destroying in relation to legacy, I think more of how easy it is to have an inconsequential legacy, one of indifference, rather than one of consequence; whether that is the consequence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg being the one woman show of the Supreme Court, or my mum making sure I will always feel her love.
Right now, we are at a turning point societally, environmentally, politically, and right now the vast majority of this room is at a turning point individually. We are about to enter adulthood or sitting just past its doorstep, the world is being passed down to us and we must decide how, in a generation’s time, we will pass it to those behind us.
At the current state of the world, our generation is not deciding how big or small we want our impact to be, we’ve lost that ability: our impact will be substantial whether we would like it to be or not. So instead we must choose whether our impact is constructive or destructive, an active fight or a lazy submission. And as for the significance we hold, the ability we have to vastly impact this world, we decide whether it is a good or a bad thing. All the work to come is ours, all that there is to build and create is ours. We are in a room full of educators and they have literally handed us the hammer, and now that it's in our hands we must choose how we yield it, for it is a tool used for both construction and destruction.
So, I ask, when you view the world think of your actions, think of what you wish to achieve, think of what your energy goes in to, and think of whether you have helped the world progress and build and move forward, or whether you’ve set it back, knocked it back, held someone back.
The world is ours, the hammer is ours, the time is ours ,so please don’t take the easy route. Instead, put a little bit more into the world than you take out. Thank you.
Faye delivered this Chapel Talk on the second anniversary of the death of Tucker Francis ’16, January 31. It was the perfect fit for this important day at our school and followed the moment of silence we held to remember a young man who always thought about how he could make a constructive contribution to every situation and positively impact others. Students like Faye and Tucker, there are so many, make us proud through their words and actions. They are ambassadors of our mission tenets of personal responsibility, high standards of achievement, care for others and committed citizenship, and we look forward to their influence and their legacy in the world to come.
