Words of hope for a life in limbo

Yesterday I caught Anderson Cooper's commencement speech to the graduating class of Tulane University on the radio in my truck and I sat riveted – hanging on his every word. I felt like he was speaking directly to me.

And I have to admit after listening to his speech I felt comforted.

Cooper is one of my personal heros. He is a member of a group of elite journalists I venerate like secular saints.

Like Ed Murrow, Cooper is a broadcaster. And like Ed Murrow, he is a rarity among broadcasters. He has sterling ethics, a fiery passion, a thirst for justice and most importantly – he does his own reporting.

I admire journalists like Cooper and Murrow because you can tell that there is something – deep and unyielding – inside them that drives them to shed light on injustice, and in doing so they make the world a better place.

As proof of how bad ass Anderson Cooper is you should watch this video of him rescuing a Haitian boy from a pack of looters during the Haitian earthquake crisis. Yeah, he was reporting on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and saw this going down and stepped in – perhaps saving the kid's life.



I know right? Freakin' awesome.

Anyway, in his speech he told the story of his rise from a young, unknown journalist trying to make his bones reporting from the war-torn battlefields of the world's hot spots to a CNN anchor and host of his own show: "Anderson Cooper 360."

He said that right out of college he couldn't find a job in journalism anywhere. In his words:

"When I graduated there were hiring freezes at most TV news networks. I tried for months to get an entry-level job at ABC news, answering phones, xeroxing, whatever, but I couldn’t get hired. At the time it was crushing. But in retrospect, not getting that entry-level job, was the best thing that could have happened to me.

After months of waiting, I decided if no one would give me a chance as a reporter, I should take a chance. If no one would give me an opportunity, I would have to make my own opportunity.

I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I decided to just start going to wars. As you can imagine, my mom was thrilled about the plan. I had a friend make a fake press pass for me on a mac, and I borrowed a home video camera… and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government… then I moved onto Somalia in the early days of the famine and fighting there."

My first thought was: "Man! ... I gotta get down to Cuidad Juarez with my Flip Cam."

But then I had a vision of being ransomed by some Sinaloa hit man by the name of "Felipe the Pig Killer," "Machete Pete" or "El Loco Grasshopper," (all the cartel guys seem to have gotten their nicknames from Quentin Tarentino) and I thought better of such a foolhardy decision.

But Cooper's words did give me comfort nonetheless and his speech made me realize that just because I haven't filed a story for a few weeks, and just because the job market is cutthroat and disheartening, doesn't mean I won't have a future in journalism.

These words especially gave me hope:

"Everyone I know who is successful, and by successful I mean happy in their professional or personal life, every successful person I know could never have predicted when they graduated from college where they’d actually end up."

You mean I'm not a failure because I'm not working at The New York Times or interning at The Washington Post?

Thank you, Anderson.