Be ignorant

We have taught you to think of education as a code you can crack. We have taught you to value grades and scores more than learning. But as you graduate, remember that all learning begins with ignorance. Be willing to embrace wonder, to experience unexpected discovery, and to go in unknown directions. A posture of ignorance compels you to keep learning. Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life’s hard classes. Keep your conclusions light and your curiosity ferocious. Keep groping in the darkness with ravenous desire to know more.

Be passionate

As educated Americans you have choices that most do not have. Even with the vast inequalities and continuing economic crises in our country, your diploma or degree places you among the most privileged in a privileged country. Most people are forced to work jobs that pay the bills and starve their spirits. You may be able to escape this fate, but only if you are brave enough to follow your passions even when the economic rewards are not completely clear. Never trade your soul for a paycheck.

Be of service

You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are  entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth.  So your rent is steep.  Pay it with service.

Make mistakes

We have asked you to excel in every endeavor and to avoid anything that might diminish your record of excellence. We rewarded you for following the rules and not for making your own.  But you must not be afraid to make mistakes. If you are unwilling to make mistakes you cannot find your way to your passion or be of service.  Mistakes are the tool of all invention. They litter the path to greatness.  Throw your imperfect self headlong into the crazy, scary, painful, humbling world. Please.

Because, Class of 2013, we are counting on you. We are sending you out into an imperfect world with imperfect skills, but what you do with it will define more than your generation. It will define our nation and our world.

Angelina Jolie’s op-ed in the New York Times, in which she talked about her double mastectomy, raised awareness about breast cancer and the gene, BRCA1, that puts women at high risk of developing the disease.

“We want to feel that we have this measure of control, where we think if we do everything perfectly, if we get the right screening test, if we get the right reconstruction, we will be whole as people and we will get to survive,” said Salon‘s Irin Carmon. “We don’t have the power to control all of those things. Some people will die, and it[‘s not because they were weak or because they did something wrong in every case.”

Host Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel discussed the effect the privatization has had on health care and the politics of fighting cancer on Sunday’s show.

Breast cancer has become a multi-billion dollar industry for non-profits, drug companies, and the insurance industry, which has led to what some think is too much awareness.

The Susan G. Komen foundation came under fire last year over a battle with Planned Parenthood–which was seen as a departure from their mission–but as Carmon put it, the Komen foundation has always been “a politicized group that has claimed a non-political mission.”

Rose-Ellen Lessy, a professor at the New School and New York University, described what it felt like to be bombarded by instructions to be concerned about breast cancer while her mother was dying from it. She also spoke about America’s “pervasive testing anxiety” and how this anxiety will allow Myriad, the company that has patented the gene, to turn a profit on the fears of women.

Watch the discussion and watch the show every Saturday and Sunday at 10 AM ET on MSNBC.

“There is no silver bullet,” for stopping military sexual assault President Obama said earlier this week. Surely, that came as no surprise to his former defense secretary, Leon Panetta, who said more than a year ago: “There is no silver bullet when it comes” to solving military sexual assault.

That couldn’t have been news to K.C. McClain. As an Air Force brigadier general in 2005, McClain told reporters then that a series of actions the Pentagon was taking—again to combat sexual assault—was “not a silver bullet. To do this right, it is going to take time,” she said.

Incredibly, Chuck Hagel, the current secretary of defense, came out to alert the troops on Friday that there is no “silver bullet” to fixing a problem that just gets worse.

For 20 years, some of the most powerful men—from commanders-in-chief to the Pentagon’s top brass—have leaned on a single cliché each time they have been forced to confront the epidemic of military sexual assault.

During that same period of time more and more servicemembers have been raped and abused by their colleagues. Perhaps it might be time to move on from the “silver bullet” theory and start looking for more effective weapons to combat the problem.

More than 20 years ago, a massive sexual assault scandal involving dozens of female service members rocked the military and prompted Congress to demand swift action to change a culture rife with misogyny and violence. Investigations into the incident, later known as “Tailhook,” proved embarrassing for the Navy in how it handled sexual assaults and led to proposals and programs designed to combat harassment. Legislators at the time called it a “watershed event” that could eradicate harassment altogether. But two decades and two wars later has laid bare a thick chain of empty promises to protect service members and punish perpetrators of sexual assault.

Those at fault start at the very top. In the last two weeks, two high-ranking officers tasked with heading sexual assault and harassment prevention programs in two different branches of the military have been accused of abusing women.

Democrat Sen. Kay Hagan, a member of the Senate Armed Services committee, described a fearful scene while on Morning Joe Monday morning.

“Women actually have told me they’d limit the intake of fluid in the late afternoon, early evening, so they don’t have to use the latrine late at night in the middle of the night, because they’re worried about sexual assault,” she said.

Calling it “shameful, disgraceful,” and “dangerous to our national security,” Obama tasked his top officials in the Defense Department to renew efforts to do better by soldiers who find themselves less safe in their own ranks than on the battlefield.

This is not the first time the Pentagon has responded to sexual crimes by calling for more awareness and training. Senators and House members want to overhaul the military justice system after years of promises to study the scope of the problem and policies that have done virtually nothing to reduce the number of assaults. In the world of the military, simply defining what constitutes “sexual assault” is counted as an accomplishment.

In September 1991, more than 100 Navy and Marine pilots assaulted 83 women and seven men at the annual Tailhook Association convention. A House Armed Services Committee report released the following year said the scandal, and the Navy’s subsequent botched investigation, provided a chance for the Pentagon to change the course of sexual harassment in the military.

The committee’s chairman at the time, Democratic Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin, was optimistic about the military’s ability to launch a “successful program against sexual harassment on the scale of the successful program against racial discrimination and against drug use” within five years. The result? Sensitivity training and a 1-800 number for reporting complaints. Aspin brought that optimism with him when he became secretary of defense in 1993, but his 11-month tenure ended without any major reforms.

In early 2003, the Air Force began an investigation into reports that it had ignored rampant sexual assault at its academy for at least a decade. The Denver Post published a multi-part investigative series that November that exposed the problem as systemic, detailing retaliation against survivors, the military’s lackluster response, and widespread violence.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 ordered a comprehensive review of the Pentagon’s sexual assault policies. A report issued a few months later found that policies for preventing assaults were inconsistent across branches, there were no safeguards for confidentiality, and support resources for survivors was sorely lacking.

A year later, a task force recommended expanded education programs, changed reporting procedures to protect victims, and defined–for the first time–what constituted sexual assault.

According to data collected by the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, there were 1,700 sexual assaults reported in 2004. The military recorded nearly 3,200 reports in 2011, and estimated the actual number was approximately 19,000.

Panetta responded to the report with a long list of changes meant to “fundamentally change” the way the military dealt with sexual assault. Calling the crisis a “serious problem” that “violates everything the U.S. military stands for,” these changes came on the heels of additional initiatives his office made in January, 2012 and December 2011. The Pentagon would create Special Victims Units and make changes to the way cases are dealt with by the chain of command.

While Jolie’s decision to undergo such an intense surgery and to share her story in an effort to educate other women has been lauded nearly universally as brave, her circumstances are far from ordinary. The test and procedure Jolie underwent are not necessarily accessible to all women. On Sunday’s Melissa Harris-Perry, the host will discuss the politics of breast cancer–specifically focusing on Myriad Genetics, the company facing a Supreme Court lawsuit after patenting the BRCA gene and the realistic availability of this kind of medical care to all women.

Melissa will also address the historic fast food worker strikes taking place across the country this year, most recently in Milwaukee. On Wednesday, hundreds of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and other fast food workers walked out demanding higher wages in a momentous demonstration of frustration with a status quo that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer. Check out our guest Dorian Warren’s new column about the strikes and the new film version of The Great Gatsby.

Also, #nerdland congratulates the Class of 2013! Thousands of college seniors will accept or have already donned a cap and gown this graduation season. But while that season is traditionally a celebration of young adults ready to forge their path in society, between debt, meager job prospects, and an uncertain safety net for the future, the class of ’13 is facing a stark reality. Host Melissa Harris-Perry will take a look at what it means to own a diploma in today’s turbulent economy, the shrinking accessibility to higher education and the future for our incredibly optimistic millennials.

Be sure to read what we’ve linked above, and watch Melissa Harris-Perry Sunday at 10 a.m. EST on MSNBC! Also, don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #nerdland.

Jessica Hinves, a former member of the U.S. Air Force, talked on Saturday’s Up with Steve Kornacki about her rape and its devastating effects on her career.

For Hinves, and for many survivors of sexual assault, the cost of reporting an attack is almost unimaginably high. “Even though I was put in counseling with combat veterans who had PTSD and were allowed to continue their careers, because I was raped, I had to lose my career.”

Watch Jessica Hinves tell her full story and watch Up with Steve Kornacki every weekend at 8 a.m. ET.

Harris-Perry will also discuss the progress made this week by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Barbara Boxer to reform the process of reporting sexual assault crimes and bringing perpetrators to justice. Gillibrand and Boxer proposed new legislation on Thursday that calls for taking sexual assault cases out of the military chain of command entirely. Their announcement comes on the heels of yet another military arrest made this week of an Army sergeant charged with abusive sexual contact and allegedly forcing a subordinate female soldier into prostitution. Harris-Perry will be joined by someone who helped draft the new legislation: Anu Bhagwati, a retired Marine captain and co-founder and executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network.

With the news that the Associated Press’ phone records are subject to scrutiny by the Department of Justice, we’ll examine the delicate balance between protecting national security and upholding our right to privacy. Just what can the government know about you? “MHP” will explore a new report that indicates the administration may back the FBI’s initiative to expand wiretapping privileges to the Internet.

Lastly, the Mother’s Day Parade shooting in New Orleans that left at least 19 people wounded was just eight blocks from Harris-Perry’s home. She will share the incredible story of one victim, 10-year-old Ka’Nard Allen, who now counts Sunday’s injuries as his second gunshot wound in his young life. Also, we will compare the vastly different gun control law different states are taking. MSNBC reporter Trymaine Lee will join us to discuss his new report on Harris-Perry’s home state of Louisiana, focusing on their extreme political resistance to sensible reform. Read it now on MHPshow.com.

Be sure to read what we’ve linked above, and watch Melissa Harris-Perry Saturday at 10 AM EST on MSNBC! Also, don’t forget to join us on Facebook, and on Twitter using the hashtag #nerdland!

“Not only is it a crime, not only is it shameful and disgraceful, but it also is going to make and has made the military less effective than it can be,” Obama said in a meeting Thursday with Hagel, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, and top military and national security personnel. “This is not a sideshow. This is not sort of a second-order problem that we’re experiencing. This goes to the heart and the core of who we are and how effective we’re going to be,” Obama said.

The president vowed to task the military’s top personnel with overseeing efforts to address the long-standing, but chronically under-reported crisis.

“We will not stop until we’ve seen this scourge, from what is the greatest military in the world, eliminated,” Obama said.

Monica Medina, a former Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense under Secretaries Panetta and Hagel, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Friday that a spotlight cast by Congress and the president on the issue could lead to reform.

‘The fact that sexual assault prevention officers within the military weren’t really taking it seriously is a sign that despite the tough talk at the top, it hadn’t permeated down through the ranks. So it’s time for that to really take hold now,” Medina said on Andrea Mitchell Reports Friday.

According to a Pentagon report, 3,374 instances of sexual assault were reported in the fiscal year that ended on September 30. The Pentagon estimates that as many as 26,000 military service members may have been sexually assaulted during that time, based on the reported number and anonymous surveys.

Congress, led chiefly by the women’s caucus, brought the issue to the forefront of discussion in recent weeks, holding hearings with military officials and sexual assault survivors. Legislation has been introduced in both the House and Senate to combat the prevalence of assault and to change the institutionalized reporting system.

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill Thursday to remove the prosecution of these crimes from the military justice system. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice system, officers in the chain of command have the ability to overturn a jury verdict, even on sexual assault cases.

Gillibrand called on Hagel, who has voiced support for no longer allowing commanding officers to overturn a verdict, to remove a commander’s ability to decide whether or not a case goes to trial.

“If you have 26,000 assaults a year and only 3,000 reported, you have a large structural problem,” Gillibrand, a Democrat,  said on Andrea Mitchell Reports Friday. ”We have to create a system whereby victims actually can receive justice to give confidence to other victims that they can come forward and hold their perpetrators accountable.”

The Associated Press reported Thursday night that Lt. Col. Darin Haas, the manager of the prevention program at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, turned himself into police on charges of stalking his ex-wife and violating a restraining order she had against him. According to a military source, Haas and his ex-wife had orders of protection against each other, and a police sergeant in Clarksville, Tennessee, reports that Haas contacted her repeatedly on Wednesday night, constituting a violation. Haas, who police say is engaged in a child custody battle with his ex-wife, reportedly spent 12 hours in jail and was released.

An Army statement indicated that Haas has been removed from his position in the sexual assault prevention office, and that he was due to retire soon.

News of Haas’ arrest comes as the military sexual assault issue is becoming a top priority for President Obama, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress. The president on Thursday met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the heels of a startling Pentagon report released on May 7 detailing the uptick of 2012 military sexual assaults to 26,000, an increase of more than 34% from the previous year. Army general Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the matter “a crisis” because the military is losing the confidence of women who serve that an effective remedy will be found and enforced. The president said about those present at the meeting:

“They care about this, and they’re angry about it, and I heard directly from all of them that they’re ashamed by some of what’s happened. They understand this is a priority and we will not stop until we see this scourge from what is the greatest military in the world eliminated.”

A day prior to the release of the Pentagon report, the head of the Air Force’s efforts to combat such assaults was arrested for sexual battery. An unnamed Army sergeant assigned to an assault prevention office at Fort Hood, Texas, was accused on Tuesday of multiple sexual offenses, including “abusive sexual contact” and forcing at least one female officer into prostitution. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York led the announcement Thursday morning of a new bill aimed at taking major criminal cases involving rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment out of the military chain of command. “We believe enough is enough,” said the senator, adding later that “when any single victim of sexual assault is forced to salute her attacker, clearly our system is broken.”

See more coverage of this issue on Saturday’s edition of “Melissa Harris-Perry,” when Service Women’s Action Network executive director and co-founder Anu Bhagwati will be our guest.

Bloomberg ranked the Top 50 Trade Group CEO paychecks and only eight women made the list. Those eight women earned an average of $1.31 million in the most recent tax year. Which sounds good, until you hear that the 42 men who rounded out the list earned, on average, $1.93 million. In other words, women CEOs made about 68 cents for every dollar made by male counterparts, and about $600,000 less than their male counterparts.

“It seems like men and women would have equal lobbying ability,” John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said, “I can’t see why there’d be any difference in pay. The most obvious answer is that it’s discrimination.”

Linda Lipsen of the American Association for Justice, told Bloomberg that “women should make up at least half of this list.”

Of course, the question isn’t whether the men deserve the salaries they’re earning. Bloomberg points out that Thomas Donohue leads “the largest, most active, and most influential trade organization in the world” at The Chamber of Commerce and he tops the Top 50 list with $4.95 million banked in the most recent tax year. No, the question is why are only eight women included in a list of 50? Challenger is right in saying that men and women have equal lobbying ability. When will lobbying boards realize that this equal ability should translate into equal pay and compensation?

Bloomberg ranked the groups’ influence by the total amount of time they spent lobbying in the capital during President Obama’s first term.

“I think you have to change the system by changing how justice is served and that means allowing victims to report directly to a trained military prosecutor who will then decide whether the case should go to trial,” Gillibrand said Thursday on NOW with Alex Wagner.

A Pentagon report released last week revealed that the number of reported cases of sexual assault has risen 6% since 2010, while the number of unreported incidents–based on an anonymous survey of members of the military–rose 35% from 19,000 in 2010 to 26,000 last year.

“This is a crime that has been happening for a very long time and they have been trying to fix it for decades,” Gillibrand said. “What we need to do is change the system. We actually need to change how these cases are reported, how they are reviewed and how they are prosecuted so we can begin to see justice.”