Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial! China is running an industrial-scale organ harvesting operation—killing prisoners of conscience on demand, and for profit, Jan Jekielek, author of the New York Times bestseller Killed to Order, reveals. And Chloe Cheung talks about being part of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement until she fled China and now lives in exile with a $1 million bounty on her head. New episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe!
Let's get into it:
One of the most exciting things about May is that we get to hear from all those commencement speakers tapped by various universities to speak their wisdom to the waiting, expectant ears of the next generation. The speakers tend to take these opportunities to reveal to the grads, from their own experience, what's most important in life, passing down wisdom they have earned during the years since they stepped off the commencement stage with their brand new degrees in hand.
Erika Kirk spoke this year at Hillsdale College, accepting an honorary degree on behalf of her late husband, Charlie Kirk. As a young widow, with two children to raise on her own, she knows that the most important times in her life so far are the ones she was able to spend with her family, when it was whole. She urged young people to embrace family, to marry young, and to have children.
While I married young, I did not have a child until more than a decade into that marriage and I count my blessings daily that I had a child at all. In listening to her words, I couldn't help but agree—there is time in life for career, for work, but when God presents you with the opportunity for love, you must take it, you must meet love where it stands and embrace it, but be wise enough to know that love comes from God and must be returned to him, too, within a marriage.
Harrison Ford's plan was to tell grads to stay poor and miserable. I did not agree at all with Ford, a man I first knew as Han Solo in the Star Wars films, who spoke to graduates at Arizona State University over the weekend. He peddled woke slop that won't make any of their lives better, won't make the country better, and won't make the world better. He told them all about becoming an actor, learning his craft, honing it, and taking parts that he was passionate about. But said that wasn't enough meaning for his life.
In terms of meaning, he said social justice was the most important thing, touted climate justice, and told grads this is what they should focus on. "We have an essential mandate to protect 30% of the world's land and sea by 2030, to prevent the mass extinction, to slow the warming of our planet."
"We need a cultural change," he said. "We need to extend social justice. We need to respect and elevate the indigenous people that are being marginalized and in many cases killed in cold blood." They he claimed that natural resources "are not commodities, but relatives to be cherished." After that, he urged grads to "honor nature's authority, generosity, bounty, and justice of her example," because "the world you're stepping into, the world my generation left you is a real mess."
So basically, Ford lived his life as he pleased, now regrets not having taken a more active role in social justice, and demands that the next generation fix it—on his terms—and dedicate their lives to fixing it. Not only is this not a recipe for happiness, or liberty, but it will keep them broke and depressed, and they will not actually succeed. There is no "saving the world," there is only living a good and honorable life, raising good children to lead an honorable life, and contributing to a community, a nation, and in that way, yes, the world that values the mission of leading a good and honorable life.
Libby