Commencement speech gets failing grade

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/05/2024 (887 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reading Harrison Butker’s commencement address to recent graduates of Benedictine College created in me the feeling articulated in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath:

“In the souls of people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Steinbeck spoke for the downtrodden, oppressed, and disaffected. In promoting a return to values and beliefs that were prevalent in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s who does Mr. Butker speak for?

Certainly, he doesn’t speak for me as a man, or for my mother who grew up in those years and had to live with the values and beliefs espoused by Butker. In his speech he says that women have been told “the most diabolical lies” and should aspire to get married, have children and embrace “the most important title of all: homemaker.”

In Butker’s world if women get married and have children they will live happily ever after because their husbands will look after them. The role of men, according to him, is “to set the tone of the culture.”

In presenting this idealized vision Butker does a grave disservice to the actual reality of people all over the world. Ironically 80 years ago women did aspire to get married, have children and let their husband look after them.

In this regard my mother was no exception. Growing up poor on a small family farm during the depression years was difficult. After high school with no money to go to university, let alone enrol in a private “liberal” college like Bendictine, she took a six-week course which enabled her to teach grades 1-8 in a one-room rural school. Eventually as a teacher she ended up in the Pas where she met my father, a returning war hero and gold medallist in his civil engineering class.

She was 22 then, the same age as the Benedictine College graduates. Fast forward to age 28, the same age as Harrison Butker, she was a widow with two young children.

What happens to the many women in the world whose dream of a happy life as a homemaker ends through no fault of their own? What happens when they wake up one day to the reality that their husband has died working in a coal mine, in an industrial accident, from an incurable illness or suffers from an addiction or mental illness?

In my mother’s case and the case of the other six widows whose husbands died in the same plane crash, they approach the male hegemony known as The Workmen’s Compensation Board (since renamed The Workers’ Compensation Board).

In a less than magnanimous gesture they say that they will give these widows a small monthly income which will keep them in poverty for the rest of their lives until they remarry and if they don’t sue their husbands’ employer for negligence.

If Butker had stopped his speech after outlining his traditional views about the roles for men and women, I would say that, although I disagree with his assertions, he is entitled to his opinion. But no, he had to go on to make critical comments about women using birth control, exercising their reproductive rights, IVF, surrogacy, Medical Assistance In Dying (euthanasia), “gender ideologies,” “the deadly sin of pride” and finally being Jewish.

Clearly Butker’s world is a narrow and rigid one where being different is not tolerated. All this coming from a 28-year-old place kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs whose chief claim to fame is that he won the genetic lottery as it pertains to kicking field goals.

The question becomes how we respond to the Harrison Butkers of the world. The quarterback of the KCCs Patrick Mahomes said in a recent interview that he doesn’t speak to Harrison even when he sits beside him in a team meeting.

Mahomes might be on to something. In The Grapes of Wrath one of Steinbeck’s characters says:

“A man needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut.”

Mac Horsburgh resides in Winnipeg where he researches and writes about contentious issues.