I’m sorry James Franco canceled at the last minute. I’m even sorrier that you wound up getting me as your substitute commencement speaker, but I was offered gas money plus a free lunch.

I believe Franco planned to talk about your potential—to say that you are the future, that your prospects are limited only by your imagination, that you should follow your passions and be true to yourself. Society has invested its hopes and resources in you because children, schools, and a better tomorrow are today’s top priority.

But I don’t have to tell you that all these statements are total bull.

Because you already know.

You know, because you were a public high school student in California during the past four years. Roughly one in every nine of your teachers was laid off since the recession hit. The number of days of school in many of your districts was cut. California’s per-pupil spending on you has fallen during your time in high school—from 46th out of the 50 states to 48th. Your state dedicated $3,000 less per year to your education than the national average.

You may not even know what a school counselor is, since California has so few. The average high school in American has 77 percent more teachers per student than the ones you attended. You had a curriculum considered so out-of-step it’s in the process of being replaced, and we have little idea how good the teachers who taught you are because so few of them are evaluated on their performance.

Most people, if they were treated this shabbily, would stew or leave the state or give up. But not you, the 400,000-plus members of the California Class of 2013. You stayed and succeeded. You did more with less.

By test scores, admittedly an imperfect measure, more than 80 percent of your schools score above 700 on the state’s Academic Performance Index. That compares to just 31 percent of all schools a decade ago. More of you took harder classes, particularly in science and math, and you did better in them than your predecessors. The dropout rate has declined thanks in part to your determination to stay in school. And majorities of those of you in so-called “high-risk” demographics—English-language learners, migrants, special education students, kids from low-income families—are graduating despite your handicaps.

In short, you guys are tough. And you’ll need to be, particularly if you stay in California. Jobs in most places and professions will be hard to find. The military is cutting back. Tuition fees at our public universities are literally double what they were when you were in middle school. On top of that, the state has made it harder for you get into one of the California universities your family’s taxes have been supporting—because it needs to admit more out-of-state students, who will pay much more than you.

But, because of how poorly you’ve been treated, you’re very well prepared for this new California. For your parents and grandparents, this state was about dreams and rising. That’s an outdated story. As your high school years demonstrated, life here is about struggle, about fighting for what you need, about working harder in hard times, about identifying ways to win unfair games. Finding happiness in life won’t be about achieving the easy life but about making your struggles as beautiful as possible.

There won’t be much you can count on in this California—too many things are changing. But there is one group you should count on: your classmates.

We hear so much about younger Californians being a super-diverse lot. And that’s true, if we judge you by the diverse origins of your parents and grandparents. But you and your classmates also have more in common than any previous generation of Californians. A majority of your generation of Californians was born and raised here. That’s new; throughout the state’s modern history, a majority of Californians had been born and raised someplace else. You went to the same schools and have shared the same struggles.

That makes your classmates your best natural allies. Yes, you’ll want to go in different directions, move to different places, and leave your high school days behind. And yes, you can and should remake yourself. In this world, you can change your major, your career, your family, and even your gender.

But you can never change where you went to high school.

As a reporter, I’ve often found that, thanks to too many overlapping jurisdictions, Californians don’t know what municipality they grew up in or live in now. The question you have to ask Californians—if you want to understand where they’re from—is where they went to high school.

So embrace your high school and your classmates even as you leave them. Keep in touch, via technology and as much as possible in person. You’ll find the people you went to school with will be able to help you make contacts, find jobs, and offer you perspective you can’t get anywhere else, not even from James Franco.

The secret to surviving this California is to keep fighting, like hell, together.

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

The obstacles Sotomayor overcame to get where she is today are amazing, and the lessons she has drawn from her life to impart to others are inspiring. I also think it’s particularly cool that the book was published simultaneously in English and Spanish.

—Linda Greenhouse is a longtime Supreme Court watcher and the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.
 

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The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins by Jeff Connaughton

This fascinating but disturbing memoir exposes how poorly our political system works when it comes to controlling the financial industry and why, when it comes to Washington, D.C., as Senator Dick Durbin admitted in 2009, “Wall Street owns the place.” Connaughton, who worked for Joe Biden and Senator Ted Kaufman and as a lobbyist, gives a vivid portrait of what he calls “D.C. style,” which helped me understand why I found Capitol Hill so baffling and difficult. It confirmed my worst fears but also convinced me it is very important to alert and engage the public.

—Anat Admati is the coauthor of The Bankers’ New Clothes and an economist at Stanford University.

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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne

I simply couldn’t put this book down after reading the first chapter. Using the tale of Quannah Parker, the great Comanche leader, Gwynne develops a story of the life and times of the Comanche nation. The Comanche were feared warriors who became the dominant military force in much of the Great Plains. Quanah Parker, the son of a warrior and Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Comanche at a young age, rose to become a major chief who led his nation during a time of unprecedented change.  A narrative of an exceptional person and a dominant nation at a time of upheaval, Empire of the Summer Moon makes for engrossing and memorable reading.

—Neil Shubin is the author of The Universe Within and a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

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Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes by David Priestland

It’s absurdly simple as a framework, but once you start thinking about it and engage with the book, it just makes so much sense. It will really change how you think about both history and power.

—Mark Blyth is the author of Austerity and a political economist at Brown University.
 

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Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard (A Memoir) by Laura Bates 

Bates, an English professor at Indiana State University, discusses her experiences teaching Shakespeare in prison. Her memoir is yet more proof that there are prisoners locked away in solitary confinement who hunger for the opportunity to be intellectually and creatively engaged and can be rehabilitated. During classroom discussions and in their written work, Dr. Bates’ incarcerated students bring Shakespeare’s words to life with their insightfulness, proposing literary interpretations that rival those of acclaimed Shakespearean scholars.

—Richard Mora is an Occidental College sociologist.

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The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future by Michael Levi

There is a lot of talk today about the revolution in U.S. energy, and this book is the best I have seen in laying out what really is and isn’t happening, and providing thoughtful ideas for the steps forward.

—Shannon O’Neil is the author of Two Nations Indivisible and a Latin America analyst at the Council for Foreign Relations.
 

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The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti

This is the new book I want to read. The rise of drone warfare and the blurring of the lines between intelligence, counterterrorism, and war-fighting are all major legacies of the last decade. I heard Mazzetti speak at a conference I organized last month in D.C., and he was terrific; every indication is that this book is one of the best accounts yet of how the use of American power has been transformed in the years since 9/11.

—Kal Raustiala is the coauthor of The Knockoff Economy and director of UCLA’s Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations.

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Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

I adore every single word that Mary Roach writes. She can make any topic hilarious and fascinating. Her book Bonk, about the science of sex research, is the single funniest book I have ever read. And even though I am doing research for NASA, I learned a ton about planning a Mars mission from her book Packing for Mars. Her latest book, Gulp, is about the disgusting journey from mouth to toilet. I wouldn’t necessarily call it thoughtful or provocative, but it will be a fascinating, surprising, entertaining read.

—Traci Mann is a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota.

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Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith

This is an honest, smart, and funny story of a man’s surprising journey into understanding his own anxiety. Written with a memoirist’s raw honesty and journalist’s innate curiosity, Smith weaves fascinating digressions into medicine, culture, and scientific research throughout his own entertaining narrative. It will make you laugh while simultaneously teaching you something you didn’t know before. Whether you feel anxious all of the time, sometimes, or rarely, this book will leave you feeling calmer by the end of it.

—Erika Hayasaki is an assistant professor of Literary Journalism at UC Irvine and author of the forthcoming book The Death Class.

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The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard

There was a time when shimmering stars and the glow of the Milky Way stood out against the black sky of moonless nights. Today, millions upon millions of glowing bulbs generate a collective radiance that blots out the night. Bogard asks what happened to darkness. And what does the loss of darkness mean to man and beast?

—Bill Streever is the author of Cold and Heat and a biologist.
 

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And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight by Paula Mitchell Marks

I didn’t grow up in this country—I’m from Brazil—but, oddly, one of the most popular clapping games I played growing up featured a man born in the Old West and raised among the brave: Bat Masterson. I never knew who he was until, while on assignment in Tombstone, Arizona last summer, I stayed at a hotel that featured the names of men who fought in the O.K. Corral Gunfight. Turns out Bat Masterson was one of them. So I bought And Die in the West. People who are interested in history, in the Old West, and in colorful gunfights are bound to like it.

—Fernanda Santos is the Phoenix bureau chief for The New York Times.

One important man in my mother’s life was her boyfriend R. Lee. Whenever he came over, he’d bring us kids chips, cookies, candy, or something, and he was always nice to us, even when Michelle, our mother, wasn’t. We loved him.

When Michelle would straighten our hair, my sister Renee and I would fight to avoid going first. We hated it, because Michelle didn’t allow you to flinch, even when she was singeing your ears, neck, and forehead. All night, our heads would be burning.

Michelle would curse at us. She’d say, “Be yo’ black ass still, you li’l bitch, before I bust yo’ ass in the head with this straightenin’ comb.”

R. Lee didn’t like that. “Don’t call your girls bitches,” he said one night. When Michelle kept doing it, R. Lee opened the door and started shouting to everyone that Michelle was calling her little girls names. R. Lee yelled, “Bitch caller! Bitch caller!” I guess it must have embarrassed Michelle, because she eventually stopped using the word on us—at least in front of R. Lee.

Michelle also got involved with a guy named Carlton Smith. Carlton was tall and husky, with huge hands. The one good thing about Carlton was that he’d promised us a pair of kites. We were excited about that.

One night, after finding out that Michelle and R. Lee were together, Carlton confronted them when they were coming home to Michelle’s house.

“Hey, Rod, man, you seeing my woman?” Carlton asked. “If you are, I’m ’bout to whip yo’ ass.”

“Man, I don’t want no problems,” R. Lee said. He was only five feet tall.

Carlton turned to my mother and grabbed her, smacking her and dragging her into the house by her head. I still remember that: one of his hands all wrapped up in her hair. My brother Tavien and I stood in the doorway and didn’t move.

Later, Carlton was busted for a few crimes and wound up going to jail for a long time. He died there. But Tavien and I never forgot about those kites we’d been promised. We talked about it every once in a while.

Michelle was always more at ease when R. Lee was there. I think she fell in love with him. He was six years younger than her. Before long, they had a child together, my baby sister Rhanita. Three years later they had another child, Janice.

They did everything together. That included robbing, stealing, and using drugs. R. Lee used cocaine with Michelle every day.

Because Michelle ran the streets so much, she had my aunt Tanya babysit us. Tanya was about 15, just eight years older than me. She had a boyfriend named Rudy, who would come over while she was babysitting. Rudy was also R. Lee’s little brother.

One night, after Tanya had fed us, bathed us, and put us to bed, I was awoken by a blast. All I could hear was Tanya crying. I crept downstairs toward the noise and into the living room, where I saw the worst accident I’ve ever seen. Tanya was lying on the floor with blood all over her forehead. She was asking Rudy, “Am I gonna die?”

Rudy called an ambulance and told Tanya not to say who’d shot her. Then, when the sirens approached, he sneaked out the back door. I held Tanya’s hands as she lay there crying until the medics came in. They put Tanya on the stretcher and took her away. Tanya didn’t die. It turned out the bullet had just grazed her. But I don’t know how it happened.

R. Lee’s robberies led him to prison—more than once. When that happened, we’d go see him with my mother. One time, my mother dressed me in a pretty green summer dress with big blue and yellow flowers. Then she tucked two joints into it. Although the guards at the prison gave everyone pat-downs, they went easier on us children. In the yard, Michelle reached over and pretended to fix my dress, pulling out the joints and sliding them under the table to R. Lee.

It was also after one of these prison visits that Michelle almost killed all of us with her driving. Somehow, when we were on a highway, Michelle wound up swerving, and the car went completely out of control. I was screaming, Tavien was screaming, and even Michelle was screaming, gripping the wheel and trying to straighten the car as it veered left and right across the road. When she finally managed to put on the brakes, we were at the edge of a cliff. We drove home. Nobody said a word.

This is the third installment of a multipart series by Lakesha Townsend on her family history in Watts, Los Angeles, California. Zócalo will continue to run Townsend’s recollections every few weeks. 

Find out what animal fills Eric Garcetti with terror and the most bruising campaign he’s ever experienced (hint: it wasn’t this one) here.

Find out how Wendy Greuel would defend herself from a SoCal zombie apocalypse and the biggest surprises from her time as city controller here.

For all the spin on how Prop 30 was supposed to rescue our schools, the reality has been less sunny. Between the 2007-2008 school year and today, California’s K-12 school budgets lost $7 billion, or 10 percent, of their total revenues, according to EdSource. Prop 30 doesn’t reverse that. At best, the money raised by Prop 30 is just enough to keep schools where they are: gutted.

Just two years before Prop 30, I worked with our local education foundation in my San Gabriel Valley town to save two educators and our award-winning elementary music education program from elimination. The next year, we were asked to save those music teachers again—and to save our (also) award-winning elementary physical education program and to protect the jobs of our media staff so that our school libraries and computer labs could remain open.

We couldn’t raise enough money to do it, so we lost our district’s sole elementary P.E. teacher, who, because of previous cuts, was already shared between four schools.

If there is anything we’ve learned, it’s that once something disappears from school budgets, it doesn’t come back. Even when money is restored, the people you couldn’t afford to pay—the people who make things work, and work well—move on to other jobs. Since Prop 30 was approved seven months ago, my children have had three different temporary replacements for that P.E. teacher, each of whom has left our district for a better deal elsewhere. Our P.E. classes swelled from 50 children to 200, with aides shouting at the students through megaphones. One parent told me that our P.E. classes reminded him of a prison lot. Prop 30 hasn’t changed that.

State policymakers paint a brighter picture. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office recently projected a 24 percent increase in school funding over the next five years. But, again, that allows us to do little more than stay in place. In the past five years, California laid off 32,000 teachers, 11 percent of the teacher workforce, statewide. We have a long way to go to get back to where we were, and I have yet to hear about any hiring.

Prop 30 was not the fiscal cure for all that ails the schools. Think of it instead as an emergency blood transfusion. Perhaps it will give the public schools enough fiscal strength to get back on their feet eventually, but I wonder how.

Meanwhile, parents, educators, and students should catch our collective breath and prepare for the next battle. Because once people start to think that the schools are flush, they’ll say our students don’t really need all that money, and we’ll have to start defending a status quo that’s already unacceptable. So rather than rejoice in budget projections that may never materialize, let’s rest up and plan for how to bring some improvements that we can see, hear, and feel in our classrooms and schoolyards.

And then I didn’t.

It happened on a warm July morning on one of my first calls as a volunteer EMT in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. As I stood on a dock on Fire Island, attempting to teach a group of 7-year-olds how to swim, my fire department pager went off. A voice crackled, “Cardiac event, delta response.” I raced to the firehouse and careened into the ambulance bay. When I learned the address of where we were headed, I knew it was the home of my friend Jack. I’d known him all my life. He was my age, and throughout that summer Jack and I had whittled away countless afternoons on his Boston Whaler, listening to Bob Marley and soaking up warmth through our tanned, freckled skin and sun-bleached hair.

On a barrier island, light and air combine on certain days to make colors unnaturally vivid. Everything—leaves, clouds, grains of sand—seems to have more defined edges and an almost liquid clarity. That July morning was one of those days: hot, clear, and—up until that moment—completely ordinary.

When I arrived at Jack’s house, laden with equipment and mentally reviewing everything I knew about cardiac events, I pulled open the door and saw a group of people standing in a bedroom doorway. I suddenly felt very, very cold. Jack was on the floor, the sheets of his bed tangled around his legs. Two other EMTs were doing CPR. Another EMT grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out of the room. I walked out of the house, stood for a moment in that clear, liquid light and, unsure of what else to do, got back into the ambulance. I watched the medical examiner enter the house, and, when I heard the guttural, animalistic scream of Jack’s mom, knew he was gone.

I never learned the cause of Jack’s heart attack, but during the few seconds I’d stood in that bedroom, Jack’s face—mottled and covered in vomit—had been etched into my memory in perfect detail. It haunted me for months: every time I closed my eyes, every time I started to relax, every time I sat down to study.

Over the next few weeks, my initial shock turned into crippling grief. I blamed myself for not getting to Jack sooner, for freezing under pressure, and for having been useless to him and his family. My certitude about becoming a doctor began to dissolve: maybe I couldn’t function under pressure; maybe I couldn’t help people; maybe I would be a horrible doctor.

I headed back to Georgetown that fall wanting to forget everything that had happened over the summer. I was taking General Chemistry and going through the motions of studying, but my brain felt like it had been coated with Teflon. I’d lost Jack. My father was at home, battling cancer. Previously driven and meticulous, I found myself unable to commit anything to memory, unable to focus, and unable to care. I lost my appetite and rarely slept. My grades slipped, and I told myself that someone who got a C+ in Chemistry and couldn’t handle the loss of a single patient would make a lousy doctor. Reluctantly, I abandoned the pre-med path.

After college, I took a job at a law firm in Manhattan, purely to have work. Several tedious months and many paper cuts later, I was out to dinner discussing life goals with a friend when a woman sitting at a neighboring table handed me a napkin on which she’d written the words “post-bac pre-med.” I did some research on such programs, picked a few that seemed reputable, and dropped some applications in the mail.

One evening, not long after that dinner, I was on a treadmill listening to Bruce Springsteen belt out “Born to Run” when a clearly panicked woman ran up to me and began tugging on my sleeve. (In retrospect, I suppose the red “Ocean Rescue” emblazoned on the back of my old lifeguarding shirt suggested that I knew some basic first aid.) I turned to see the body of a fit, middle-aged man wedged between two stationary bikes. Despite my previous misgivings about my medical abilities, I stepped off the treadmill and knelt over the man. One set of compressions, two shocks from a defibrillator, and several prayers later, I handed the gentleman, now breathing, with a strong, steady pulse, over to medics and headed home in a whirlwind of adrenaline and disbelief. As I walked (OK, more like bounced) home, I realized, when I was honest with myself, that it didn’t particularly matter to me whether that man lived or died. What mattered was that I had done everything I could possibly do to help him; I hadn’t frozen under the pressure.

Today, I am wrapping up my Masters in Public Health at Dartmouth’s Institute for Heath Policy and Clinical Practice, and next fall, when I start at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine, I’ll be on the path to becoming a physician. I can’t tell you that I don’t still have moments of self-doubt: Am I smart enough? Will I really become a good doctor? Will I be able to practice the kind of medicine I want to practice in our current healthcare system? But what I can tell you is this: I have held a 90-year-old woman’s hip in traction for 40 minutes while she cried in pain; I have immobilized a 10-year-old boy, numb below his chest after a swimming accident, while his mother screamed over my shoulder; I have comforted a mother who just realized her child was dead; and I have held the hand of a woman experiencing a late-pregnancy miscarriage. Most importantly, though, I have learned that there are times when empathy is the most valuable treatment I can offer a patient.

This journey has not been an easy one, but it has made me more aware of how great a privilege it is to practice medicine. It has also been full of ups, downs, and unexpected detours that have made me more humble, more cautious, and more inclined to ask “why?” But it is these experiences, this knowledge, that I hope will—eventually—help me become as good a doctor as I can possibly become.