George Saunders delivers a speech to the Class of 2013 at Syracuse University
addressing 'the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it'.
In this speech Saunders uses numerous rhetoric devices and I will provide a detailed
analysis on how he use of Kairos and Stasis successfully attributed to his argument.

Immediately you see that Saunders is taking the audience into account with comments
like 'Some old fart, his best years behind him,' and 'one useful thing you can do with an old
person, in addition to borrowing money from them'. His playful humor about the age gap
between him and the graduates is successfully used to gain their attention. He then goes into
telling a story as a means to answer a common question that his young audience has been
asking: 'looking back, what do you regret?'. With this question Saunders shows an
awareness of disagreement with his argument. Even though, one can assume that the
frequency of the usage of this question would rise during periods of major life changing events,
it goes without saying that recent graduates wouldn't want to think of the last few years as any
type of regret. George Saunders himself maybe wondered this very question when he was
sitting in one of the chairs in front of the podium dressed in his graduation cap and gown.
Whether the latter be true or false, he sees being kind as having enough importance and
relevance to announce it to a large assembly of people.

As he starts his story he begins by comparing events. In this way he defines what his
definition of truly regretting something is. He makes his way to an event in seventh grade
involving a small, shy girl who becomes the new kid in his class. Utilizing the Kairos of the
situation he goes into detail about her and events involving the two of them. You can easily
infer that he is depicting these connections to hone in on another topic of interest to the
audience: bullying. Saunders planned this inductive reasoning for the audience. Bullying is not
the subject of this speech but it does provide him the opportunity to state his claim to be kind
to listening ears. As the attention of the audience is captured by Saunders, he makes the story
end with the small, shy girl moving away in an unassuming manner, and then he answers the
initial question: 'What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness'. It's a simple and
complex concept all rolled into one, due to its own kairos dependency. He emphasizes his
answer as: 'Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering,
and I responded ' sensibly.'

Saunders moves on to ask why we aren't kinder. Getting to the fact of the issue he
establishes his conjecture. He states the reasons are: 'we're central to the universe, we're
separate from the universe, and we're permanent'. The quality of these three answers is
Saunders way of giving his audience his definition. Once again, with his understanding of his
audience he provides a more casual simplistic recapping of the message to the three answers.
He uses the extrinsic proof of the normal American life and the intrinsic proof of his personal
growth of kindness thorough his life time to show that he knows what he is talking about, thus
proving the worthiness of his quality. Next, he questions how we could be kinder to one
another. Saunders states we already know how to be kind. He utilizes some of the
commonplace knowledge held within the average American life and constructs a hypothesis to
the reason we already know how to be kind. His explanation is that, throughout their
experience, in life the graduates have been through periods he calls 'High Kindness' and 'Low
Kindness'. 'High Kindness' are times when you were exceptionally kind or the beneficiary
of such kindness, and 'Low Kindness' are the times when you were less than kind or treated
unkindly. Saunders describes kindness as a high and a low to show that it is a skill that we can
develop and train so we can be prepared to so it when needed. These examples help paint the
importance of the Kairos and Stasis his argument to be kind.

Lastly, Saunders introduces the notion that people get nicer the more they age. He says
'we come to see how useless it is to be selfish. ' We come to love other people and are
thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality'. This allows for him to turn the funny
opening liner about his age into a more relevant subject that contributes to his knowledge of
the topic. He is equipped with a 50 year lifetime of logos and ethos to show how most people
become less selfish and more loving. He is adamant that the audience presumably will face the
same fate. He does not want this speech to be like any other but stand out and produce kinder
people. He is clear in his message when he states: 'And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish
for you: As you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be
replaced by LOVE'.

Yet still, Saunders is not finished. With time looming over him, his last bit of advice is
delivered after a 'Congratulations, by the way'. He looks at success and its meaning in a
majority viewpoint. With the graduates recent accomplishment he can tell that success is a
term on everybody's mind, but he speaks of success in a negative tone. By this Saunders
downgrades the Kairos of success and uses it to further explain the importance of his argument.
He is not saying that success is a mentally insane complex but he does want the graduates to
realize that success should not take up to much focus of what life should be. Life is big, with
many mysteries, and he wants the graduates to not get lost in one idea and forget to see the
bigger picture. So now that the graduates see the part kindness plays in life, he ends his speech
with the policy portion of his Stasis theory: 'Since, according to me, your life is going to be a
gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now'.

I believe that Saunders provides a compelling argument to the importance of being kind.
I've been to multiple graduations, and this article makes me wish I was there. His casual tone
didn't come off as lame or misunderstanding of the younger generation, but on the contrary,
helped move his speech along. I like that he differentiates between the thought of what
kindness looks like from the actual actions of kindness. He shows how different people have
different viewpoints of kindness by depicting the different Kairos moments within it. He
develops a nice and consistent structure to his Stasis theory by providing easily relatable
situations to prove that we know what kindness is and that people grow kinder as they grow
older. I enjoyed his metaphor of success and I used my personal life journeys to help picture his
claim. Saunders use of rhetorical writing in his speech to the Class of 2013 at Syracuse
University is evident throughout and makes this work an enjoyable read.

