In the old movie cartoons Road Runner is always being chased off the edge of a cliff. But he never actually falls until he suddenly looks down, discovering that there is nothing but air under him. Then he drops like a stone, flattened into a pancake and shattered like glass. That is how our society has been in this economic maelstrom. Individually and collectively we lived for years well beyond our means. We have mindlessly taken on too much credit card debt. We have used car loans to buy giant SUV gas guzzlers. We have taken out student loans – a ton of those. We have ballooned bank debt. We then bundled our mortgage debt, sliced it, diced it, and even pretended to insure it with “credit default swaps.” Our state is billions in debt. Our national debt is in the trillions. To be deeply in debt has become the American way of life, and we suddenly have all found ourselves in a modern-day equivalent of a Dickens' debtors' prison. The GDP of the American economy is $13 trillion and total debt in America is 100% of that -- $13 trillion. The last time we collectively owed that percentage was in 1929.

Meanwhile both the Yankees and the Mets still greedily believed that they could jack up ticket prices outrageously simply because they moved from an old stadium to a new one. They assumed that Joe Six-pack and the fat cats, who once could afford the corporate boxes, would happily pony up whatever was asked, even if A-Rod is disabled and was hitting his home runs on steroids. And on Broadway we were asked to pay up to $450 a ticket if we wanted to guarantee a good seat, even if Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein was only a mediocre show, now closed. Up to now we all paid whatever the freight; using plastic. We purchased at the mall endless things which came from China and we partied on.

Right now nationally the class of 2009 is graduating into a universe where jobs are scarce, where substantial skills may still not get many employed, and where dumb luck too often seems the determinant. What is loosely called “Wall Street” is a shambles. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are gone and Citibank and AIG are corporate “zombies,” operating on life support with new levels of leveraged debt that seemingly drop into a bottomless pit.

In reality, like Road Runner, our society naively assumed we were on solid ground when we were already falling through space and about to go splat. As a nation, we need to sober up fast, to reconnect to values beyond those that are monetary. The truth seems to be there is no longer an easy “up” escalator to carry us automatically to a cushy, ever growing and prosperous lifestyle.

At this point you may be thinking, “Why is he ruining my commencement by talking about a hypothetical undergraduate's bad luck to be hitting the labor market at such a bad time?” I promise to end my Jeremiad at this point. This is not an extra final exam in economics. I am not going to hector you further about America 's profligate ways.

But I do submit that this is when higher education, the learning process more than the degree itself, suddenly becomes a precious product. You have been trained to think, to be empowered with sharpened analytic skills, to become self-aware. Your education has also prepared you, perhaps more than you think, to cope with the stresses and strains of a hard scrabble world. But first you must set your own existential priorities. Our society has grown fat and lazy. Up to now all kinds of jobs seemed to abound, and most of us simply went with the flow. But this is no longer a scenario likely to work.

And so, the pressing question must still be, “how are you going to cope?” How do you take charge of your life at a time of personal, familial and societal hardship? Let me submit you must figure out what you really want to do and to be. None of us believe we are truly grown-up. It is a state of existence we are all always trying to achieve. Was your advanced degree worth the money and struggle? Or let me put it differently. If you had to choose only one, but truly only one, of the following five possible priorities for how to live your life, which would it be: (1) fame, (2) power, (3) money, (4) security, (5) fulfillment? Each priority will take your life in a different direction. What is your risk tolerance and how in the future will you measure either your “success” or your “failure?”

In sum, your education must be used to determine your own life priorities. And if you can and will focus like a laser on this threshold question, that process will validate all those classes, all these years of study that may have seemed so irrelevant a year or two ago. This is “the great end and real purpose” of higher education. You must construct a foundation for your life, not simply drift into a job.

Our society and you enter a new era, one which challenges each of you in complex and difficult ways. Our prayer is that you will find your own way in these very difficult times so that in the decades to come you will look back on this challenging moment as one that forced you to come of age. As that great, post-modern galactic philosopher, you know as Yoda, put it: “May the force be with you.”