<p>I thought Mary Bass a long time Seattle school board member gave a great speech at this years Garfield graduation, but I don’t have the text. ( daughter graduated last year- I was there to help with afterwards )</p>
<p>The year older D graduated, her class asked their advisor to speak- it was beautiful and made me cry.
Im going to call this item The Fairness Postulate. The Fairness Postulate also has two corollaries.</p>
<p>The Fairness Postulate is as follows: Life is not fair.</p>
<p>Like all postulates, this one is self-evident. No one needs to prove it to you because youve experienced for yourselves how life is not fair. It isnt fair if your family is in turmoil. Major illnesses arent fair. The college application process isnt fair. Having a learning disability isnt fair. It isnt fair when the people we love get sick or die or abandon our friendship for someone elses. It isnt fair when you have to abide by the rules even when youre smarter than the rules are. Being the only class in the school without laptop computers isnt fair. Not being able to use a perfectly good word you just made up to win a game of Scrabble isnt fair. Speaking as a biologist, natural selection isnt fair, either.</p>
<p>So no one needs to teach you the Fairness Postulate. But let me suggest two corollaries, which I believe are not so self-evident and are much more important.</p>
<p>The First Corollary to the Fairness Postulate: Life isnt supposed to be fair. When life was designed, fairness was not in the specs. Fairness is not a quality that life had in some Golden Age past, or that it might acquire in an Utopian future. Life falls down on all of us without regard to who we are or what we deserve.</p>
<p>A few years ago I went one evening to a meeting at the Temple de Hirsch Sinai. The speaker was the woman who tried to save Anne Frank and her family by hiding them in that attic. After she spoke, the audience asked her questions, and one question was, If you could tell parents and teachers one thing you wished they would teach all our children, what would that be?
<p>I think you could argue from the first corollary to the fairness postulate that the basis of human compassion is a full understanding that life is not built fair and therefore we must be kind to each other.</p>
<p>The Second Corollary to the Fairness Postulate: The statement life isnt fair is not a complaint. It makes as much sense to complain that life isnt fair as to complain that grass isnt orange. Really getting this postulate means not being disappointed in life because it fails to be fair.</p>
<p>Justice and compassion are another matter. These are qualities that HUMANS are supposed to have, and the statement Humans are unjust is a valid complaint. Forget fairness. Work for justice, and dont require of life that it be fair for you to love it.</p>
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