A redemption 24 years in the making

At the invitation of its student leadership, on Wednesday, April 23, 2025, I strode onto the auditorium stage of my beloved alma mater to address the newly-minted inductees of Clayton A. Bouton High School’s National Honor Society.  

For the assembled students, the evening was probably just one more ceremonial milestone encumbered by yet another self-indulgently verbose alumnus. But for me, it was a singular life event falling somewhere between “homecoming” and “full-circle cosmic redemption strongly intimating our existence in a virtual matrix designed by some superbly witty higher intelligence.”   

Anyway, I’m publishing my remarks in the hope that they can be more broadly useful to the recent high school graduates who now officially advance one step farther along their own narrative arcs. Class of 2025, may you ever define the future you’re destined to discover.

With no further ado, I present: me.

This is actually the second time I’m addressing Voorheesville’s National Honor Society. And it’s fitting that I was invited to deliver these remarks by your co-president, current high school senior Ava Tabakian, because it was her grandfather, Mark Diefendorf, who facilitated my last address to this estimable organization back when I was a high school senior myself.

I’m about to share an exploit that wouldn’t be advisable today, were it even possible. And for the faculty in attendance who know what’s coming next, don’t worry: I’m gonna land this plane. 

Nearly a quarter century ago, on Thursday, March 8, 2001, I was watching the local evening news while finishing up some homework after school. That was back in the early dawn of a new century, a new millennium — an era that had been unironically depicted by the time’s preeminent political scientists to be “the end of history….”

We didn’t know it yet, but my senior year — the 2000-2001 school year — was the closing act of a self-congratulatory decade defined by unparalleled American prosperity atop the ashes of what was, already by that point, a nearly forgotten Soviet Union.  

Imagination failed us. March 2001 was just before the 9/11 attacks and America’s 20-year Global War on Terror, before search engines and social media, before smart phones and selfie culture. We didn’t see the future coming. None of you people even existed on that fateful late winter day, which is why it’s wild to contemplate how unrecognizable my senior year would’ve been to you — I can’t even imagine what school is like now. Do your classes even still use books?

I don’t remember which local meteorologist spilled the news, but when 18-year-old me heard that snow was forecasted for afternoon the next day, the senior prank pretty much concocted itself.  

I was, at the time, vice president of this National Honor Society. That position had equipped me with a ream of paper sporting the school’s official masthead, a single sheet of which I now loaded into my family’s inkjet printer. I then typed the following memo into whatever was the then-prevailing word processing software:

To all faculty,

Due to worsening weather conditions, we are calling an early dismissal at the conclusion of sixth period, approximately 12:10 p.m. We ask that you inform your students no sooner than 11:45 a.m. to prevent any further disruptions such compromising weather has already caused. Please do not dismiss your students prior to an announcement directing students to leave the building. We appreciate your help.

Sincerely,

William F. Furdon, Principal

Time was, FedEx Office was called Kinkos, and it was to that Wolf Road print shop that I piloted my ’82 Volvo DL with a single copy of what I thought sounded pretty convincingly to have been authored by my high school principal. The document lacked only a signature, which I then supplied, on-site, while standing beside the commercial photocopier on which I next proceeded to produce 50 copies of what was sure to net me maybe one or two after-school detentions.  

The memo was dated Friday, March 9th, and it was during second period of that morning that I began distributing copies of this letter, asking recipients: “You hear we’re getting out early?” I placed a few copies on some teachers’ desks, I intruded on a gym class to share the good news, I rolled my eyes at any students who noted, with suspicion, that it wasn’t even snowing outside.

“Dude, I’m just the messenger,” I’d say, grandly referring them to the signed document.

By fifth period, I’d forgotten about the entire thing. It didn’t even cross my mind when it began snowing. But when dozens of parents started pulling their vehicles up to the school’s curb — a phenomenon now visible to everybody as we gazed out the windows of Mr. Hunt’s “Distance Learning” class — I recall the sudden and sinking feeling that — somehow — I had just materially influenced the operation of the universe. 

And just as I was experiencing that inner chill, Brittany Burnham whipped around in her seat in front of me and hissed: “Jesse Sommer, what did you do?”

That was about two seconds before Associate Principal Joe Dragone’s voice boomed out over the public address system: 

“Jesse Sommer, move to the principal’s office immediately.”    

What I wouldn’t find out for several days was that sometime during third period, a particularly proactive 10th grader had found a copy of my memo and then used the school’s payphone out front to inform his mother that school was dismissing early. He had demanded that she come pick him up. (This was around the time that the American adolescent became head of the household. You guys know what it is.)

This mother was surprised by her son’s report — and annoyed to have been so — so she promptly called the Channel 10 news desk to complain that the station had failed to alert parents of Voorheesville’s imminent weather-related closure.  

Channel 10 responded not by confirming the veracity of this report with Voorheesville school officials, but rather by just running a “school closing alert” ticker along the bottom of its regularly scheduled programming.  

Not to be out-scooped, Channels 6, 13, 17, and 23 then immediately followed suit. By 11 a.m., unbeknownst to anyone inside the building, the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and FOX were all running early dismissal notification chyrons across their broadcasts in a staggering sector-wide failure of due diligence.  

I didn’t know any of this. I also didn’t know that Associate Principal Dragone had been blindsided by the few dozen parents who were now occupying the parking lot to await receipt of their kids.

As was later relayed to me, Dragone had walked outside to investigate but was spared what might’ve been a professionally catastrophic exposure of the fact that the inmates had taken control when a secretary ran out with a copy of the memo “signed” by Principal Furdon — who, inconveniently for me, had left for Florida the morning before to attend a conference of school administrators.  

By the time Mr. Dragone’s voice had demanded my neck via intercom, he and Dean of Students Joe Sapienza had already committed to the face-saving decision to call in the school buses. They’d also called the sheriff.

When I arrived at the principal’s office, the secretary invited me to take a seat.  “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Mr. Sommer,” she’d said, very disapprovingly.  

I could hear hushed but clearly agitated voices emanating from Dragone’s office; the mood strongly counseled my wholesale denial of culpability. But that became an increasingly tenuous posture after the main office announced via schoolwide PA that school was, in fact, being dismissed at the conclusion of fifth period.

And when the bell sounded minutes later, the halls erupted with a stampede of students shouting such pointedly unhelpful exclamations as “Jesse Sommer dismissed school!”  

Dean Sapienza emerged from Dragone’s office first. He looked pissed. You know the look; that head-tilted-upward tight-jawed stoic silence by which he telepathically conveys all complex emotion.  

“How do you know it’s me?” I stammered, offering humanity’s guiltiest-ever admission. 

His fully expressive response: “Jesse.”

Next out of the office were the two responding sheriff’s deputies followed by Mr. Dragone himself.  Together, they informed me that I’d be charged with forgery, distribution of a forged document, and distribution of a forged document on official letterhead with intent to deceive.  

That’s how I remember it, and that’s all I remember. I have absolutely no recollection of any events from that moment until the following Monday morning when my parents — who were then in the midst of exploring the legal process by which to disown a child — joined my meeting with school administrators. I presume my central nervous system just shut down for a weekend; nothing registered.

I wasn’t arrested. In lieu of expulsion, I was extended a courtesy two-week out-of-school suspension, towards the end of which my parents finally started speaking to me again. It was also towards the end of that suspension that I received a letter from the National Honor Society’s faculty advisor, my beloved AP U.S. history teacher — your grandfather, Ava.

Mr. Diefendorf’s letter directed me to tender my resignation from the National Honor Society for actions “totally inconsistent” with the values of this organization. But in what history has now shown to be just the first instance of the Diefendorf bloodline affording my thoughts a platform, he invited me to address the fellow students who would no longer be my peers in this association.

And that’s what I did. I apologized for my actions, I acknowledged the willful and deceitful exploitation of my station, and I exited the classroom where Mr. Diefendorf had assembled the members of a society of which I’m no longer a part.  

****

Two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, I should not have done that, and I wouldn’t have done it had I known it would actually work. Beyond betraying my office and the authority entrusted to me, relatively new teen drivers could have been seriously injured leaving school that afternoon before the highway department had finished salting the snowy roads.  

On the other hand, that was the single coolest thing I’ll ever do in life.  

So now that we’re 10 minutes into this tirade, let’s extract some lessons. What did I learn from this?  Or, maybe better, what have I learned since this?

The first thing I’ve learned is that forces beyond your control will determine what happens on the other side of your diploma. I was 18 in 2001, and could have been charged as an adult for forgery or manslaughter or negligent homicide if the atomic particles in our quantum array had been arranged only marginally differently. Instead, I am so deeply and genuinely touched to be asked to speak to you today.

The second thing I’ve learned is that every one of my successes has been a function of the communities in which I’ve invested myself. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a little naughty.

But I loved my teachers, and I was grateful for the stage that they daily made available for antics that they mostly tolerated. When faced with the application of due consequence for my misbehavior, the adults in my life reciprocated, viewing me wholistically as warranting a second — or seventh — chance.

Whether it’s been in assembling a team to facilitate my entrepreneurial ventures, or in supporting the soldiers with whom I twice deployed to active combat zones, I’ve borne witness to application of the universe’s most fundamental mathematical equation, as first formulated by the Beatles: “The love you get is equal to the love you give.”

In this building, I’m back where I belong. I took the long way home.

I obtained law and business degrees, I was decorated for Army deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve been a resident of six American states. But I remained a columnist for The Altamont Enterprise through much of that journey, always suspecting that the most fundamental elements of my outlook and identity were forged right here, during my adolescence.  

Whether it’s this year, next year, the year after that, you’re all soon to be scattered to the four corners of the state, the country, the Earth, the digitally holographic universe in which we probably already live.  But right now, here, you’re developing every tool you’ll ever need to meet the challenges you’ll face.  

And because you’re members of the National Honor Society, I am exhorting you to seek out and confront the biggest challenges known to our human experience.

You’re a member of this society because you’re diligent, or conscientious, or because you work hard.  Because you’re smart, or clever, or innately charismatic. You’re here because people listen to you.  Whatever it is, there’s something about you that warranted your induction into a society based on aptitude, merit, and honor.  

Just remember that your aptitudes are on loan to you from a higher plane. Whether that’s God, or chance, or your neighborhood, I warn you against ever feeling entitled to that which makes you special. 

If you don’t use your abilities for a cause greater than yourself, whatever it may be, I promise you that the cosmos will come to collect on that debt. I’ve personally experienced it, and the only reason you’ve probably heard all this before is because a lot of people who came before you f-ed around and found out. 

This is an organization that aggregates the people best positioned to make an impact. Make it a positive one. Or at least really cool.   

The final thing I’ve learned is that honor and morality may be in the eye of the beholder — but deep down, there exists an objective standard.   

I’ve been fortunate. The Universe never called on me to make even a single tough choice between my inner values and the legal structures undergirding our day-to-day reality. You will not be so lucky.  

You may someday encounter a government that lies to you about the origins of a viral pandemic so as to reshape society in accordance with its own misguided depiction of equitable justice.

Or you’ll watch as a government hellbent on dismantling the fabric of our constitutional order disregards the separation of powers, the spirit of the 22nd amendment, and the application of due process.

Yours will be the generation that confronts product terms of service that allow faceless corporations to stifle a freedom of expression for which our Bill of Rights offers no recourse, just as it’ll be you folks for whom the job market becomes a battlefield of human versus machine.  

The measure of a person is not whether he or she rigidly adheres to every small-minded rule promulgated by even smaller-minded authorities. The measure of a person is whether you rigidly adhere to your own mores when they’re tested.  

The decisions you make in the face of oppression big and small, the sacrifice you endure when confronted with a can’t-be-ignored injustice, the strategy around which you use your talents to rally your compatriots, that is why you’re sitting in those seats. That is why you’re sharpening your intellectual tools, building your experiential playbook, and using the résumés of which you’re all so proud to record everything in your arsenal.

To say you’re special is to say you’re cursed, chosen by virtue of your talents to use them precisely when you don’t want to. And if it ever feels like world events are writing your destiny for you, trust that it’s how you respond to forces you’re not meant to control that will author the story of your life.  

Even when it’s hard, even when you’re struggling, you will always draw strength from the people who need your help. Whether your cause is Christian traditions, transgender rights, environmental sustainability, personal freedom, whatever — stand up for what you believe in, first, but then open your mind to the equally “special” people charging at you from the opposing trenches.   

Combat plus compassion equals compromise. On a planet possessed of 10 billion people, trillions of fellow earthlings, and emerging machine sentience, the essential balance is that state of compromise — moral advocacy is how you’ll win hearts to move the needle a notch closer to justice. 

I’m not being hyperbolic or overly grandiose in depicting your induction into the National Honor Society as proof that you may someday be called to step into the breach. Life is short, but there’s a lot of it — and the next 18 years of your life are going to be freaking crazy.       

So strap in. Your commitment to the rules means you’re best equipped to know which ones to break.  Your scholastic ambition means you’re best equipped to lead. Your volunteerism means you’re best postured to help.

Barack Obama once said to my generation: “I expect great things from each of you.” For what little I’m worth, I expect great moments from each of you — right when they count most.

From the day you leave behind the instruction of Voorheesville’s incredible faculty, it’ll be your failures that become your best teachers. Embrace them.  

And as far as those teachers are concerned, while it’s true our respective senior years would be unrecognizable to each other, there are constants. One of them is Mr. Stumbaugh, a man you’ll someday emotionally train yourself to call “Brian.”  

Other constants include the halls of this school, the back roads of New Scotland, and the fact that each year finds a new group of near-adults in those very seats who are poised to forge the future. Hold onto those constants; it’s you who renews them.  

So get out there and get into trouble. Come back, but take the long way home. We’ll be waiting for you.