The following is a transcript of Adam Levin’s commencement address to the Mason Gross graduates of May 2007, delivered at Nicholas Music Center.

May 15, 2007

Today is a day for enormous exuberance. You have reached a milestone in your lives and it is to be celebrated. Each of you is to be celebrated.

It's an honor to share this moment with you, because I believe the work that lies ahead is among the most important work there is. Our civilization depends on the stories you will tell.

Standing here with you today, that belief fills me with the deepest optimism and anticipation – for your future, and for the changes you'll bring to the world.

All of you – writers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors, and designers – are storytellers. You’ve chosen to devote your lives to bringing stories to life. Whether they're told in words, gestures, rhythms, or tones, they give voice to the unheard, bear witness to the truth, and write a record of the human heart. They can be playful, quirky, humorous, deadly serious…it’s your call. But whatever angle those stories come from, we rely on them to make sense of our lives, to give clarity and narrative structure to the onslaught of events each of us processes daily.

The philosopher Eric Hoffer said it well: "Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story."

Without that sense of plot and pattern, things fall apart. We lose our compass and our power to act. And right now, clear judgment and intelligent action are sorely needed. As Michael Douglas, playing President Andrew Sheppard, says in Aaron Sorkin's The American President: "These are serious times, and we need serious answers from serious people."

Unfortunately, serious people are in short supply.

As President Kennedy told the world: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." Somewhere along the way, it seems whoever was carrying the torch got kidnapped.

We live in dangerous times. Tragically, we are bereft of great leaders. I grew up in a world graced by political giants: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan.

Today we can scarcely tell the "statesmen" from the shock jocks without a scorecard.

What we do have in abundance is poseurs, pretenders, and provocateurs. We're living in a time of colliding cultures. One seeks to inspire, to tell a compelling story – one that people can believe because it speaks to them, and because it's true. The other is slipshod and haphazard by design: shallow, lacking principles, looking to shock, polarize, and appeal to the lowest common denominator.

As JFK once said, "Things do not happen. Things are made to happen."

You are artists, storytellers. Your mission is to seek out the truth, explore human emotions, and give expression to the hopes and dreams of your fellow human beings. Your duty is to use your talent, your skill, and the public platform you share with your fellow artists to give a voice to those who have none of these things.

This is an awesome responsibility.

In these serious times, you have a duty to family, friends, community, to this university--indeed to humanity: be activists, not spectators. Life is not a dress rehearsal. Make your life a story worth telling.

One of my favorite quotes is from the movie The Candidate – now let me set the scene: After a bitter campaign, the votes are tallied; Bill McKay (played by Robert Redford) has narrowly defeated the seemingly unbeatable incumbent, Senator Crocker Jarman, (played by Don Post). McKay, with a bit of the “deer in the headlights” look, turns to his campaign manager and asks, barely above a whisper, "Melvin, what do we do now?"

So I now ask you the same question. What do you do now?

Your choices and your talent will decide which stories the rest of us see and hear. And make no mistake, a great deal depends on those stories, and on your skill in finding and telling them.

A story must be told to be heard at all – and it must be told powerfully to move its audience to change, to stir them into action.

I say this at a time when we hear a great deal about supposed threats to our way of life – from terrorists to Darwinists, from tyrants overseas to surveillance at home, from immigration to global warming. Some of these threats are very, very terrifying and real. Others, however, threaten, not our civilization, but those who want to control it.

Day by day, the basic social narratives that give context to our lives are being eaten away and gradually overwhelmed by a sound-bite culture of fragmentation, segmentation, disconnection and division. It's about quick hits, cheap insults, and superficial judgments.

It's about people who "aren't like us." And for those who practice it, it's often about fueling their careers through the cheapest shot of all – playing on peoples’ fears and prejudices.

Recently, the students, faculty and staff of this university stared down just such a cheap shot and responded with elegance and dignity. Unfortunately, this was far from the first time nor will it be the last that we will encounter such an insult.

The most effective way to undermine the identity of another is to replace their story with a caricature, to bury the strong arc of their true history in a landslide of trivial lies.

In the short term, it can produce results that benefit a particular individual or party: it boosts ratings, wins elections, and stifles dissent.

As a t-shirt I saw in Chicago put it: "Stereotypes are a real time-saver."

It also satisfies the popular desire for scapegoats – not just to have someone to blame for crime or war or financial collapse, but also to get the quick buzz of hurting someone without care or consequence.

It's sadism with a smile. It's verbal crack – it’s addictive. If we don't resist it, it stuns us, numbs us, and strips away our humanity.

But I am still an optimist. And as an optimist, I see this rootless wasteland as an opportunity for storytellers to plant seeds that will still be nourishing us when the locusts of talk radio and wedge politics are just dried-out husks by the roadside.

When I graduated from Stanford University, the veteran CBS journalist Eric Sevareid delivered a commencement address that I will never forget. Like today, 1971 was a time of deep divisions, fueled by rampant racism and an unpopular war. Sevareid spoke of those divisions, and of how easy it can be to systematically forget the complexity and humanity of those outside our circle. He said:

Many now see human beings as symbols. It is enough, for them, to characterize those of whom they disapprove as pigs or hippies, or Bolsheviks or capitalists or bourgeoisie. By this mental exercise their enemies are automatically dehumanized and can, with a clear conscience, be executed, imprisoned, exiled, or shouted down. Since they are unhuman, they are presumed not to bleed when stabbed.

This is perhaps the profoundest corruption of our time.

The deep corruption that reduces living, breathing human beings to symbols and stereotypes is still with us. As a journalist – and, thus, a storyteller – I believe Sevareid saw it as a corruption of narrative truth as well as political ideology. Of course, as any writer will tell you, reducing reality into stereotype, and character into caricature, strips away complexity and denigrates everyone involved – the storyteller, the audience, and the object of the stereotype – and the real story goes untold.

And there's the rub. A story that isn't told won't be heard and will never stir an audience to action. And, perhaps worst of all, it will be buried, not remembered, in history.

Storytelling is not a profession for the faint of heart. Oftentimes, it requires deep conviction and courage.

They say dead men tell no tales.

The same is true of writers, directors, actors, and other storytellers silenced by intimidation, distraction, or simple apathy. Here, too, silence equals death. And in a world of rapid-fire media where shock and awe trump substance, "silence" can be achieved by drowning real stories in a barrage of white noise, by flooding the radar screen with so much chaff that nothing can be seen at all.

Opposing that hail of mindlessness with the living thread of art and narrative is the challenge before you now.

The work you do is vital to society. It is the stuff of life and of memory. It conjures up lives long after those who lived them are gone. It examines truths seen most clearly with the 20-20 vision of hindsight that only a potent story can harness.

It accepts the risk of fracturing the world we thought we knew, in order to expose hidden continents and reveal new realities.

It takes wit and will to achieve these goals. But you have chosen to be artists, and you have those qualities in abundance.

You will undoubtedly need them.

There's an idea afoot in this land that people in the arts should hold their tongues when it comes to politics.

This seems like an odd notion to me, for a couple of reasons. First, democracy's genius is that government should answer to every citizen, from every walk of life. Why would a director, actor, musician, designer or dancer be less insightful than a CEO, bricklayer or accountant?

You might, in fact, expect meaningful political insight from someone whose life is devoted to getting into other people's heads, learning what motivates, frightens, and inspires them…not to manipulate them, but to express those fears and desires more truly.

Second, artists are perhaps best equipped to give voice to people and events that would otherwise go unseen and unheard. That could mean anything from representing the verbal rhythms of a neighborhood to stopping genocide, an abuse of civil liberties, or global warming.

In fact, I say unambiguously that your most important duty, as an artist and a citizen, is to keep the stories that matter on our radar, to keep them from being forgotten or swept under the rug.

We've seen time and time again the danger of forgetfulness – and we've seen over and over again how tempting it is simply to forget.

The day just goes so much more smoothly when shameful acts and inconvenient truths are left in the shadows.

Checks keep coming. Registers keep ringing. Gas guzzlers keep guzzling and no one worries too much about a day of reckoning – unless they're there when the trap snaps shut: Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur.

The problem is karma.

Sooner or later, we'll be there too. As we learned in Germany and in Soviet Russia, a discreet silence only buys a sliver of time. And as Al Gore has so poignantly reminded us, when the ice caps melt, there'll be nowhere to run.

If you need any further evidence of just how important storytelling is, consider how hard those in power fight to control it. To decide which stories can be told aloud and which must be whispered or never mentioned at all. To decide which voices will be heard and which will simply disappear.

Think of the effort that went into silencing screenwriters, actors and directors in the early years of the cold war. Think of David Halberstam, the first reporter assigned full-time to cover the war in Vietnam, and the resistance he faced when the story he told didn't conform to the sunny official reports coming from the White House. (And you thought "Mission Accomplished" was a recent invention.) Ask yourself why there are no photos of flag-draped coffins this time around.

Why did senator Joseph McCarthy go to such lengths to expose and root out supposed "communists" in Hollywood?

Because storytellers are powerful – and the power of their stories remains long after the Machiavellians have left the building.

Actors and directors like Orson Welles and Paul Robeson; authors and playwrights like Langston Hughes, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller; conductors and composers like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland were pursued by McCarthy. To him and his supporters, they had to be reined in, silenced, brought down

The same goes for the fatwa the Iranian mullahs declared against Salman Rushdie – an open invitation to murder a novelist over a novel. A life of terror for Rushdie, but also a sign that art matters, that truth matters, that the story matters.

Tyrants see its vitality as a threat.

You know the story. You know the story needs to be told. If you didn’t, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't do the work you do, which is so intimately intertwined with the joys, the follies and the outrages that define human history.

In 1963, the year John Fitzgerald Kennedy became an American martyr, the writer Flannery O'Connor said:
There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Neither Kennedy nor O’Connor lived to see the flatness of statistics so replaced by the shallowness of insults. But what O’Connor said is still true: “By their stories ye shall know them.”

The ancients found constellations in a chaos of stars and attached tales of gods and heroes to them. Their myths – stories of heroes put to the test – form a stellar map that also charts our joys, our pains, our victories and defeats, and above all, the dreams we share, sometimes without even realizing them.

That brings us to the Lady Scarlet Knights. They gave us a stunning 27-9 season. They reached the NCAA title game for the first time in the history of this university. Their athletic achievement will live long in our memories, and deservedly so. But there's so much more.

By their dignity, decency, and self-respect, they transcended the vile chatter that would have drowned out their moment of glory. Their apotheosis elevated them to that pantheon of heroes who inspire us through their character as well as their actions. We salute them.

As for the person who ignited the firestorm of ugliness, his name is irrelevant; we've heard too much from him and about him already. He isn't worth the airtime. Besides, at the end of the day, he doesn't matter.

Silence – his and ours – is exactly what he deserves.

Locusts come and locusts go; heroes live on. The storytellers make sure of that.

You see, as an artist, you are the antidote to the marketing segmentation and the stereotypes – the cynical slicing and dicing of our society.

Your task is daunting. However, consider the thoughts of Robert F. Kennedy as he looked for inspiration in facing the challenges of his own time.

A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the Earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the new world, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

Archimedes said: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." You can move the world. Your stories are your lever. Your talent and your training have given you a place to stand. Take your place and move us. The world awaits you.

God bless you. Now, go do what you do and make us proud.