Advice to Graduating Women (That All Men Should Know!)

"Advice to Graduating Women (That All Men Should Know!)" is the title given in If This Isn't Nice, What Is? to a commencement address given at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia on May 15, 1999. Excerpts from it were included in the introduction to God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian.

Summary

Code of Hammurabi stele

Calling this "a long-delayed puberty ceremony", Vonnegut declares all the graduates full-grown women, which biologically they were by the age of 15. He apologizes that it took more time and money to make this official. Citing Indianapolis Kin Hubbard's quote that colleges should spread out important information over four years instead of saving it up for the end, Vonnegut says all intends to provide is "the really important stuff". What's wrong with the world is that too many people follow the Code of Hammurabi, especially as echoed in the Old Testament: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". The basis of every cowboy and gangster show is this drive for vengeance. If Jesus followed this code, he would not have asked his father to forgive his tormentors, but to kill them and their friends and relatives as slowly and painfully as possible. Instead, he provided an antidote to Hammurabi with a formula as compact as E=mc2: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us". Every act of violence is pro-Hammurabi and anti-Jesus.

Vonnegut is a humanist, as were his parents and grandparents, thus honoring his father and mother, as demanded by the Bible. From them he learned that if what Jesus said was good and beautiful, what does it matter if he was God. Without the Sermon on the Mount, praising mercy and pity, Vonnegut would rather be a rattlesnake than a human. The thinking of Hammurabi has led to thousands of years of revenge, which with television has now become a form of spectacular entertainment. While we cannot control what national governments do, we can personally try to live without "the sick excitement... of having scores to settle". Having forgiven others, we can reasonably ask forgiveness for ourselves and teach the same to our offspring so they are no longer a threat to anyone. Art, however, can make us feel better, even honored, about being members of the human species. Modifying a quote from Robert Browning, whose wife Elizabeth Barrett was as good a poet, Vonnegut tells the assembled that a "woman's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a heaven for?" He also notes that the atomic bomb was first envisioned by a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, although she called it "the monster of Frankenstein".

Quad, Agnes Scott College

Having solved what's wrong with the world, Vonnegut moves onto the wants of the sexes. Women want a bunch of people to talk to about everything, men want a lot of pals and they don't want people to get mad at them. When couples fight, they're really complaining about loneliness and the fact that their partner isn't enough people. Ancient marriages united families, giving everyone more people in their lives, but now a wedding only gets everyone a single person and "maybe a few scruffy in-laws" living far away. People need to join more synthetic extended families since unlike some other cultures, we now lack natural ones. Instead, we have been swallowed by television and now computers, ignoring actual people. In terms of further advice, much of it has been covered by others. Magazines like Cosmopolitan and Elle have already warned women how to protect themselves against dishonest men. The government has already told them not to smoke cigarettes, which are evil incarnate, although cigars are so healthful that whole magazines are devoted to pictures of celebrities smoking them. Firearms, like cigars, have no fat or cholesterol and are thus also good according to the United States government.

Returning to computers and television, they are not friends or educators any more than a slot machine, all of which want people to "sit still and buy all kinds of junk". Only "well-informed, warm-hearted people" can teach children what they can become, while computers only teach them what a computer can become. Bad men may want women for their bodies, but television and computers want them for their money, which is even more dehumanizing. In a recent article for Forbes, Vonnegut declared his favorite technology to be "a corner mailbox, my address book, and the Encyclopedia Britannica". By becoming educated, reasonable, and informed persons, these graduates have made the world slightly saner. Many will enter financially unattractive fields, such as teaching. Some may become mothers, and if they do, Vonnegut advises them to keep their children away from televisions and computers and not give up on books, which are friendly and physical, and to avoid making their artificial extended family "out of ghosts on the Internet".

Vonnegut concludes by asking those in attendance two favors. Since the first time he gave a commencement address—at Bennington in Vermont during the Vietnam War when it was a women's college—he has cited his uncle Alex who said humans rarely acknowledged when they were happy, which he would try to do by stating "if this isn't nice, what is?" He asks that the graduates do that for the rest of their lives and suggests it for their class motto. Second, he asks everyone in attendance to hold up their hands if they ever had a teacher "who made you more excited to be alive, prouder to be alive, than you had previously believed possible" and to then say the name of that teacher to someone next to them.