To the Christian Graduate

Folks, it looks like they are doing graduations every year now.

For Christian thought leaders, it is a May tradition to write insufferable, bloated essays telling graduates what to do, think, and believe, even though teenagers don’t read articles because they think they already know everything. However, the articles actually serve a different purpose: they are auditions. If you sound smart enough, Christian schools will ask you to speak at their commencement ceremonies, where teenagers will ignore you, because they think they already know everything.

For this reason, I am dropping my graduation article early, in April, so that I can get a head start on being invited to give speeches. Contact me immediately, and I will have my team write a commencement address that is vaguely specific to your school.

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To the Christian graduate:

As you approach the end of your high school career, you are standing on a precipice, which is like a ledge, I guess, but maybe it sounds cooler. Either way, you should come down; it’s dangerous to be standing on a ledge, you could fall.

Anyway, as you leave childhood behind and strike out into the expanse of adulthood, please know one thing: graduating isn’t that impressive.

It’s really hard to fail high school. If you show up to class and stay awake, most schools will find a way to process you out of there. This is because schools are businesses, and they don’t really want you around for another year, because there is a new group of kids coming in, and the machine needs to keep moving, because of test scores and enrollment numbers and funding and whatever.

Regardless, now is the time to make your mark in the world or something, but most of you won’t do that for a while because you’re going on to college, which is a lot like high school, except no one checks to see if you go to class. This is because college is also a business, except in this business, if you fail a class, they will just take more of your money so you can try again.

College is also the place where they will try to destroy your faith. That’s what people told me, anyway. They said there will be Marxist professors who spend all of the class period searching for Christian students to attack and harass, also these professors will have beards, that’s how you know they are Marxist. This is why my parents got scared and sent me to a Christian college, where everybody was repressed and horny all the time.

When people try to attack your faith, you must remember that you are an adult now: you must be ready to give an account for your own beliefs. This is why, whenever someone questions any part of your worldview, simply respond by saying BECAUSE HELL IS HOT, DUMBASS and throw your head back and laugh real hard.

Some of you won’t go to college. If this is you, it means that you will get a head start into the soul-draining monotony of the work force. But on the flip side, you won’t have crushing student debt hanging over your head for the next 30 years, so I guess it’s kind of a wash.

Whether you go to college or get a job, adults will be telling you a lot of weird sayings in the coming weeks. Let’s take a look at them, and what they actually mean;

• Follow your dreams: this means “I am going to die soon, better tell this kid something that sounds wise.”

• Seize the day: this is from a movie that came out before you were born. It made everyone think that being an English major was cool. There was a cave.

• Your whole life is in front of you: this is dumb. Where else would it be?

• You can be whatever you want: this is not true. In 1992, I wanted to be Winona Ryder’s husband, and this did not work out.

The good thing about these graduation articles is that I don’t have to write a conclusion, because the teenagers stopped reading several paragraphs ago. But if I come to your school to give a commencement speech, I will have an excellent closer. I may even deliver it from a precipice.

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