Graduating into an uncertain future

La Conner’s High School seniors, every one of them, graduate with this distinct honor: Never has anyone, or any school class, been rocked and roiled by a spring like this one. Before March it was impossible to imagine finishing school without going to class. Every ritual and tradition vanished: their senior trip, prom and graduation ceremony are just the tip of the iceberg of their losses. The one lesson, perhaps learned, usually takes years to master: Life is not fair. La Conner’s seniors got a crash course and were force-fed that coarse material.

Like their predecessors from 1919, they are graduating into a pandemic, this version the coronavirus, COVID-19. The so-called Spanish Flu started ravishing the world in early 1918. It ended three years later, in 2020.That is a lesson for all of us.

Then there is our second pandemic: Racism. Some have thought that disease was under control, but that has been a whistling past the graveyard refusal to face reality. Racism came to America’s shores in 1619. Saying it has festered in the body politic – and in our minds, hearts and soul – is an inadequate metaphor. African Americans know they have been terrorized by whites for 401 years. They are not going to take it anymore. Thankfully, this spring they have allies of every color: brown, red, white and yellow.

The graduates will probably need more time to absorb this lesson: A lot of folks are not going to take it anymore. All of a sudden the early spring questions of what will the new normal look like are starting to get answered, with shouts rising from every corner of the land, and globally, too. Police brutality is all too common if you don’t look like the editor of most newspapers. My neighbors on the Swinomish Reservation have stories to share, should they wish to speak publicly.

If the graduates took modern European history, they learned about the Prague Spring, the 1968 temporary flowering of democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia. That hopeful opening up of Soviet Communism, a nation’s people joyfully venturing into their uncertain future, came to an abrupt halt, crushed by tanks. Here, the military will not come in, but how will we prevail?

Ours has been a doubly stormy spring, with every coming wind and weather indicator uncertain. It would be foolish to predict how 2020 will end for our health, the economy, justice, human decency and democracy.

This prediction is true: opening up our economy is the least of our worries. Yes, livelihoods are threatened and businesses have already failed. But saving our economy is first a health issue and then a political decision. We won’t have personal health or economic vitality without every community concerned about the health of all individuals and the entire body politic.

Whether our graduates leave La Conner or stay, they – and all adults – need to realize how large our community is, what being a citizen entails and what are the deepest meanings of justice and democracy.

Let’s hope that parents and teachers have helped them learn, not the answers, but to ask the right questions and how to assess and analyze the complex problem that living in the 21st century poses. Be Brave is the school district’s motto. We have yet to know if the students have learned that lesson ahead of the adults.

One way this year can spin into the future is that graduates and adults alike come to see 2020 as a gift: the real world presented, unvarnished, the dangers and perils that generations of earlier decisions and actions, combined with present day bad judgment and bad actors, brought to fruition. Kaboom, just like that, life as it is crashed down on the doorstep they are about to step on to.

Step they will, into an uncertain future. That is where they will live. They are not on their own or in charge, not for some time to come. But the shape of the world-to-come depends on them and what they choose to do with the years they have ahead of them.

This is also true: they are not alone.