Opinion by Nancy Gibbs: Tom Hanks manages to represent decency at a time when the country is so divided we can’t even agree on who is worth admiring.
Spotlights brighten, spotlights burn, and people such as Hanks who seldom escape the beam are either strengthened or scarred. For a celebrity who has walked many a red carpet, the traditional commencement procession through Harvard Yard was just one more stroll, though, as is often the case with the movie stars you are used to seeing on huge screens, Hanks seemed almost small in the priestly red robe and goofy cap — small and strangely unprotected.
The language of the academy is increasingly centered on who or what is centered — what voices, what values — and there wasn’t the least doubt,a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, a magisterial historian, a groundbreaking biochemist, a media pioneer and a four-star admiral, that Dr. Hanks was the center of attention. It takes an astute understanding of human physics to redirect all those energies and center the students.
Our public square suffers an acute shortage of such acts of grace. Leaders find power and profit in crassness and cruelty, and signal that virtue is for suckers. It’s a cliché that Tom Hanks is “the nicest guy in Hollywood,” that he and his wife of 35 years, Rita Wilson, somehow manage to represent decency at a time when the country is so divided we can’t even agree on who is worth admiring.
The opposite of love is not hate, Elie Wiesel said, but indifference, and Hanks put the challenge before his audience of rising leaders and explorers, artists and environmentalists, teachers and technologists. “Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grown-ups, who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans,” Hanks said.
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