Of Course the Future Is Uncertain

It is unnecessary for me to tell you that a great deal is being said and written about what is in store for boys of your age, both in the immediate and in the more remote future. Practically all of it is in the vein of Job's comforters, about whom I just read to you from the Bible. That is to say, the speakers and writers lift up their voices and weep; they rend their mantles and cast dust upon their heads toward heaven about the hardships that are in prospect for you. Now, frankly, I don't see any real justification for their doing so. Certainly your plight is in no way comparable to Job's. You haven't lost all your children and all your possessions, and, although there may possibly be a boil here and there among you, none of you is reduced to sitting in the ashes by the incinerator and scraping himself with a piece of the broken china which the student waiters so liberally supply. Nothing has actually happened to you yet. You are merely threatened with a couple of years, more or less, in the armed forces.

Young gentlemen, I ask you to consider the unchallengeable fact that never, in the history of the world, has anybody known what was going to happen.

I think that you are being over-sympathized with, if the English department will forgive this somewhat ungraceful expression, and I think that this over-sympathy is the factor chiefly responsible for what may be called the pre-draft jitters that are reported to be afflicting a certain proportion of the school and college population. With your elders and advisers wringing their hands and displaying such concern about your fate, it is only natural that that concern should spread to you. Let me urge you to calm down. As far as your subsequent lives are concerned, I don't think it makes any real difference whether you are taken into the armed forces immediately after high school, after one year or two years of college, or after graduation from college. If I may be pardoned for injecting a personal note, in this matter I speak from experience. In a way, I have tried them all. I was out of school for three years between high school and college, for one year between my Freshman and Sophomore years in college, and I was in the Army for two and a half years immediately after graduating from college. I cannot say that I found any one of these interruptions harder to recover from than the others; and I distinctly do not feel that any one of them, or all of them combined, had any harmful effect on my subsequent career, such as it has been.

I often hear: If we only knew what was going to happen, it wouldn't be so bad! It's the uncertainty that is so hard to take! Young gentlemen, I ask you to consider the unchallengeable fact that never, in the history of the world, has anybody known what was going to happen. Whatever may be new about your situation, your inability to foretell the future is certainly not it.

The future is uncertain. It always has been, and always will be. You will meet with some hardships and disappointments. No one ever lived who did not.

There seems to be a recent doctrine, which is apparently gaining more and more adherents, that man is entitled to an easy life, to get what he wants, to have things go his way, and that if life is not easy, he doesn't get everything that he wants, if things do not always go his way, then he is underprivileged, discriminated against, and unfairly treated, and has just grounds for complaint against fate, or against the social system, or against somebody or something. I know of no basis in philosophy or religion for any such doctrine, and I can think of no better way for you young gentlemen to insure your future unhappiness than to adopt it.

The future is uncertain. It always has been, and always will be. You will meet with some hardships and disappointments. No one ever lived who did not. But uncertainty, disappointment, and hardships crush only the weak man; they make the strong man stronger. Your task then is earnestly, day by day, beginning now, to build your strength, physical, mental, and moral, so that, instead of shrinking in alarm from the uncertainty of the future, you may meet it as you should, with confidence, prepared to cope with whatever it may bring.

Mr. Sumner, teacher of modern languages at Webb School of California (Claremont), gave a talk in the school chapel last winter which he has kindly put on paper for the BULLETIN.