Good Luck Graduates: Here is Your Recall Notice

Graduates. The good news is that we�d like to bring you congratulations upon receiving your hard-earned degrees. You have fulfilled your academic requirements, yada, yada, and a career and life full of challenges awaits you, yada, yada.

But now the bad news. We cannot congratulate you just yet. We teachers and professors must inform you that the education which we have bestowed upon you was fashioned from defective parts. Accordingly, all liberal arts students who graduated between 1970 and this year are hereby recalled for instructional repairs.

We have sent you out of the halls of the academy all too often proud and optimistic in the achievements of civilization. We have boasted to you of the great breakthroughs of the humanities and social sciences. We have touted to you, as it they were hot stocks, the fruits of political activism that brought about greater equality, civil rights, affirmative action and a host of liberal achievements. We told you that this constituted tangible progress in the development of the community of humans.

All of this was false and misleading. We explained that wars, totalitarianism, the Holocaust and the like were �dark chapters� of world history. We asked you to empathize, to mourn, but not to take heed.

We were deficient in our teaching. We taught you that all humans in essence celebrate life and its progress and promises. We lied to you.

Now we must call all of you back for retooling. The defective educational parts that we implanted in you in our factories of learning must be replaced. The reason for this recall is obvious. In 2001 we saw barbaric suicidal terrorist attacks on our heartland. As we watched 3000 innocents die, we relived the all of holocausts and wars of our bloody century and of all the sufferings and tortures inflicted by one human tribe upon another in all the millennia of human existence.

In the past years we watched waves of homicide-suicide bombers and a misguided war bring needless death to the cradle of three religions and the birthplace of our western culture. We therefore awoke from the delusion that anything lasting had been achieved in the �evolution of civilization� over the last 3000 years.

So we recall you to replace the pride and optimism we implanted in your impressionable minds with the correct and proper parts of your liberal arts education. After the recall you will be equipped properly with permanent parts of suspicion and pessimism.

Our replacement messages to you will emphasize to you all that if you turn your backs for a minute, bloodthirsty killers will overwhelm you. If you blink, reactionaries will strip you of civil rights and equality. If you lack suspicion, greedy persons will rob you of your tangible investments and retirement dreams.

We apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you, our students. We assure you that after your recall and retraining you will be in possession of correct knowledge about the pervasive evils of human nature. We will outfit you with better tools for everlasting vigilance to protect whatever small gains you and your communities can ever make to hold back the unrelenting march of terror, retrograde conservatism and insatiable greed.

Only after your recall and retooling will we then wish you in all sincerity, �Good luck graduates in your commencement of facing life�s true and dark challenges.�