This week I experienced a beautiful thing. My son’s graduation from high school. John got into a special program at the local alternative high school for his senior year, so he graduated from two schools, his ‘home’ school and the ‘alternative’ one. And so, even though I have only one kid, he got two opportunities to walk across a stage. It was extra poignant, and a beautiful thing to witness.
In our culture, or at least the subculture I live in, a high school education is barely the start of things. I come from a family where everyone has at least a Master’s Degree so high school seems almost a given. But it isn’t, of course, and especially so for recent graduates. It’s quite an accomplishment really (emotionally, hormonally, and interpersonally as much as academically). Especially for this beautiful group of young people that just graduated.
My son was six years old when Sandy Hook happened … the very same age as the group of young ones who died in that fateful incident in 2012. He and his classmates have since weathered regular ‘active shooter’ emergency drills at school. They’ve lived through wildfires, including a couple that came close enough to burn up the homes of some of his fellow students and teachers. The end of middle school happened just a few months into the Covid pandemic so we drove thorough the parking lot, adorning masks, to pick up his ‘diploma’ and final papers/artwork portfolio from a gloved and masked administrator. This meant he never got to connect with some friends who then dispersed to different high schools. And all of this was within days of the killing of George Floyd, which sent our very white but largely woke community into a tailspin. So much so that the public high school striped itself of it’s name (Sir Francis Drake was an explorer who came to the west coast of America just about 100 years after Christopher Columbus, and as would’ve been the case at the time, Drake owned slaves). So Drake High got the serial number of HS1327 until the community weathered a public and heated process of selecting a new name. This meant, personally for John, that he started high school in a nameless place and from his bedroom (we were just 6 months into the massive shutdowns for Covid).
If John’s reading this, he’s rolling his eyes and thinking “Really mom, a history lesson, … I just graduated from all of this.” But there’s a method to my madness. I’m not droning on just to take a trip down memory lane. I’m recounting the above because it is a lot to endure for a group of young people trying to grow up in a tumultuous world. I for one, am very proud to have watched so many of them walk across a stage … one that every last one of them deserved very, very much.
As a parent, I get to relish in the joy of watching this happen, but really we all might benefit. These young people have weathered a lot, and come through as shining stars. God willing, to quote a young man’s speech on Tuesday, they “have a lifetime to grow into the change-makers the world needs us to be.” The good will expressed by John’s fellow students, the talent expressed in speeches, poems, song, and multiple languages, was very inspiring. I wish I could convey it adequately to those of us who now regularly cower from the evening news. Because we are in good hands, people. This upcoming generation has what it takes to get us through the worldly morass we are currently in.
Good times are coming. Yes, may it be so!
