David McElroy

Everybody gets a trophy these days, because everybody is special. Except, well, most people aren’t special. Not yet. Not until they’ve done something exceptional.

At one of the nation’s best high schools, a teacher stood at graduation last Friday and told his departing seniors something that shouldn’t be remarkable. (See the video of the speech below and the full text underneath that.) What English teacher David McCullough said should be obvious, but in a world where children grow up being told they’re special just for being themselves — without having to earn recognition by doing something with their potential — it’s a radical step to tell the truth.

“You are not special,” McCullough said. “You are not exceptional. Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you, you’re nothing special.”

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We live in a crazy and scary world when you have to be worried about a salt with a deadly weapon almost everywhere you go.

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With apologies to the men who drafted and adopted the U.S. Constitution, I have to point out something that’s not especially popular: There’s no such person or entity as “We the People.”

I frequently see political groups — from every orientation — claim to be “We the People.” Democrats used it to attack the Bush administration. Republicans use it now to attack the Obama administration. (The Tea Party groups seem to especially love the phrase.) Libertarians and various fringe groups do it at times, too.

In all cases, these groups are trying to claim that their views are the legitimate will of “the people.” The problem is that “the people” don’t speak with one voice. For instance, activists demanding gay marriage in the name of “We the People” have a very different thing to say than a religious group demanding recognition of the traditional definition of marriage, even though they also claim to speak for “We the People.”

There isn’t one big collective voice of “the people” speaking. There wasn’t one when the Constitution was adopted. There’s no such thing as a collective will — and there’s no moral way to impose One True Way on everybody in the name of “We the People.”

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