To Be Equal, by Marc Morial, will return soon.
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ChildWatch: Education
Advice for Young Graduates
Once again, this is the joyous time of year when families, friends, and teachers are cheering on graduates of all ages who have worked so hard and made them all so proud. I hope many of today’s high school and university graduates will wander off the beaten career path and help redefine success in our culture, asking not “How much can I get?” but “How much can I do without and share?” Asking not “How can I find myself?” but “How can I lose myself in service to others and leave our nation and world better than I found it?”
During this season I like to share some of the lessons for life I offered my own children and many of the extraordinary young graduates I’ve had the privilege of meeting over the years. The pace of change in the world young people are inheriting continues to accelerate exponentially, but I still believe there are some enduring values and advice older people can share, and agree with Archibald MacLeish that “there is only one thing more powerful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.” I feel strongly that it is the responsibility of every adult—parent, teacher, preacher, and professional—to make sure that young people hear what we have learned from the lessons of life that helped us survive and succeed, for them to hear from us what we think matters, and for them to know that they are never alone as they go to meet the future.
Here are a few of those lessons:
There is no free lunch. Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for. Take the initiative in creating your own opportunity, and don’t wait around for other people to discover you or do you a favor. Don’t assume a door is closed; push on it. Don’t assume if it was closed yesterday, it’s closed today. And don’t ever stop learning and improving your mind.
Set thoughtful goals and work quietly and systematically toward them. Resist quick fixes, simplistic answers, and easy gains. They often disappear just as quickly as they come.
Assign yourself. My daddy used to ask us whether the teacher gave us any homework. If we said no, he’d say, “Well, assign yourself.” Don’t wait around for your boss or your friends or spouse to direct you to do what you are able to figure
out and do for yourself. Don’t do just as little as you can to get by. If you see a need, don’t ask, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Ask, “Why don’t I do something?” Hard work, initiative, and persistence are still the non-magic carpets to success for most of us. And a critical reminder: Don’t be a political bystander and grumbler. Vote. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
Never work just for money. Money alone won’t save your soul or build a decent family or help you sleep at night. Don’t confuse wealth or fame with character. Don’t tolerate or condone moral corruption, whether it’s found in high or low places, whatever its color or class. And don’t confuse morality with legality. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once noted that everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal. Don’t give anyone the proxy for your conscience.
Don’t be afraid of taking risks or of being criticized. If you don’t want to be criticized, don’t say anything, do anything, or be anything. Don’t be afraid of failing. It’s the way you learn to do things right. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down. All that matters is how many times you get up.
Always listen for the genuine within yourself. “Small,” Einstein said, “is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” Try to be one of them. “There is,” the great Black theologian Howard Thurman said, “something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” There are so many noises and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.
And a final lesson: Never think life is not worth living or that you cannot make a difference. Never give up—no matter how hard it gets, and it will get very hard sometimes. An old proverb says that when you get to your wit’s end, that’s where God lives. Harriet Beecher Stowe said when you get into a “tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.” The tide will turn—if you dream it, if you believe in it, if you have faith in it, struggle for it, and never give up. —May 23, 2025
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Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Cruelty Is a National Scourge—and Would Be Made Worse by the MAGA Budget Bill
“Our neighbors are living in fear. And that’s what the administration wants. They want people to be scared. So, we’re combatting that by bringing the neighborhood together and saying, ‘you’re not going to frighten us into complicity; you’re not going to frighten us into hiding; we’re one neighborhood, regardless of anyone’s immigration status, and we’re going to stay one neighborhood.’”
That is how Gabe Gonzalez, an organizer in Chicago’s Rogers Park, described how his neighborhood has responded to Trump’s immigration crackdown—both during his first administration and throughout the first months of his current one.
On Martin Luther King Day this year, I gave the keynote at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual MLK Day breakfast. It was Inauguration Day. The contrast between the hope in that room and the fear outside—especially among Chicago’s immigrant communities—was sharp. Reports had already confirmed that Donald Trump’s new administration would make Chicago “ground zero” for an intense national sweep by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Raids were imminent.
The mass Day One sweep did not materialize quite as advertised by Trump’s border czar Tom Homan. But thousands of people were still swept up across the country that first week of the current Trump administration. The fear these actions are still creating is very real. And for good reason.
Since then, the Trump administration’s deportation campaign has spread. What started in Chicago has become a national scourge. Families are being separated from Denver to Worcester. Parents arrested in front of their children. Kids coming home from school to find their homes ransacked and caregivers gone.
When armed agents grab someone without a warrant, haul them away from their
family, and disappear without explanation—that is not just cruel. It is lawless. That is why community groups like Gabe Gonzalez’s have set up rapid response teams, legal observers, and know-your-rights trainings. In some cases, their efforts have stopped ICE in its tracks.
The cruelty of these raids is matched only by their chaos. ICE has arrested green card holders. Detained US citizens. Deported people who know the US as their only real home to countries they barely remember—or had fled for safety. All of this is meant to send a message: no one is safe.
The message is loud. And so is the silence that often follows it.
People are afraid to report wage theft or unsafe working conditions. Parents fear school pickups, or taking their kids to church on Sunday. Victims of domestic violence stay silent, worried that asking for help will get them deported. And even documented immigrants live in fear.
This is not security. It is terror. And it is why so-called “sanctuary cities” like Chicago—and "sanctuary states” like Illinois have put policies in place making it illegal for local law enforcement to participate in immigration crackdowns. Police already face enough trust barriers with many of the communities they work in. That makes their job harder. Being part of Trump’s anti-immigrant terror campaign would in some cases make it virtually impossible.
It also could be about to get even more dangerous. The Republican budget bill moving through Congress would supercharge ICE with $80 billion in new funding. More agents. Fewer guardrails. And a leadership culture that seems more interested in punishment than justice.
And the strategy is broader than immigration. This is a movement that spreads fear, then exploits that fear to divide us—Black from Brown, citizen from immigrant, neighbor from neighbor. But as Gonzales and other organizers in Chicago have shown, solidarity still wins.
This fight is about more than policy. It is about who we are. It is about remembering that every person—no matter where they were born—deserves dignity. Deserves due process. Deserves safety.
The poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It makes no mention of any race, religion, or country of origin. It speaks to immigration making our country what it is. Making us stronger. Making us what Frederick Douglass called the most "perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen."
That is the American Way.
Back in January, at Rainbow PUSH, I said that when a nation is divided, we stop seeing our own reflections in our neighbors. But our neighbors are still there. They are helping care for our kids, growing our food, rebuilding our towns after floods and fires. They are us.
So, all of us must respond as if it were happening to us—because one day, it could be.
That means fighting the cruelty with clarity. Standing shoulder to shoulder with immigrant communities—and sometimes, in front of them. Supporting Congress to pass good bills and reject bad ones that undermine due process.
Organizing non-violently. Voting. Showing up for our neighbors and the rule of law.
And it means calling this what it is—immoral, unjust, and defiantly at odds with the real American Way.
—May 20, 2025
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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