North Quincy - Speech 1945

N. QU1NCY HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION SPEECH 1945
JUDITH HANSON

The coming generation has always been under fire. Whether it was the coming generation of 1945,1925 or 1876, the present generation was sure the younger one was all wrong. It was too careless, too frivolous, too indifferent to its responsibilities. It'-has listened to endless admonitions beginning--When I was a boy or when I was a girl.

In spite of the gloomy predictions about it, the present generations has always survived--and creditably. Each successive one has become the present generation and then the past shaking a warning finger at its successor. Yet, each one has solved its problems and left behind its contributions to the great American tradition.

Are we equipped to tread the untrodden paths, to solve the puzzling problems of the world ahead with its new industrial, governmental, and social conditions? The earlier generations faced a predictable pattern of life. They could not stray far from the old well-worn grooves. However,the coming generation of 1945 is faced with new conditions. Conditions on which the sage advice of its elders 'can throw little light.

It is this future, which this graduation class of 1945 is soberly facing tonight. We take courage from the achievements during the last few years of our brothers,cousins, and friends. Flung into the fiery furnace of war, they have not failed in courage, endurance, suffering and even death. For the end is not yet, for many of us shall join them in finishing the work that they have begun. For we are the coming generation by whose hands the new world will be formed.

Are we equipped? Can we accept the challenge? Nurtured in an American public school, we have had every opportunity to develop the courage and initiative that our future demands, as countless generations before have met theirs and as you have met yours.
Thank you'