Graduating into scary, unknowable new world
It’s spring, it’s graduation season, let hope have its moment. We must insist on that. On a spectacularly sunny afternoon this week I walked around my Toronto neighbourhood and saw a lawn sign congratulating the class of 2020, graduates who happened to be, in this case, from my now-grown children’s former high school.
It made me smile. It gave me hope. Remembering what now seems like our halcyon personal past and ruefully contemplating not only the pandemic present, but the future of the future, if you know what I mean.
Don’t rule out the Class of 2020, wherever they may be, because of a still raging global pandemic that has interrupted their studies, drastically altered their plans to celebrate their grad, blown the summer and perhaps forever job market for them, and probably doomed them to at least a first virtual year of university.
Give hope its moment. It’s what all new grads deserve whether they’re moving from high school or university and whether or not their new grad attire includes wearing a protective mask.
Regard renowned Toronto artist Anita Kunz’s striking illustration on the cover of the May 18 Innovators issue of the New Yorker magazine, 12 very distinctive portraits of graduates, slightly more women than men, all of them wearing what has become the universal symbol of this pandemic season: a protective face mask.
We won’t always call these grads the Pandemic Generation, as they put together their own grad and senior prom, high school and university commencement memories, virtual or not.
They will all be uniquely shaped by what the world is facing now.
And they can all be reinvigorated by the virtual commencement wisdom meant to inspire. Former U.S. president Barack Obama, has delivered two online high school graduation and university commencement messages (and a little pointed denunciation of the Trump administration’s mishandling of the current public health emergency). Among other things, Obama advised, “Be alive to one another’s struggles.” They will have to be.
There was also Oprah’s challenge to grads on a Facebook live event, “What will your essential service be?”
With our communities gradually reopening after a shocking number of deaths, months of lockdown and with many restrictions still in place — this graduation season will be unlike any other. The standard clichés won’t work. Follow your dream hahaha. But wait — why not? Who said we don’t still need our dreams? We may need them more than ever.
Graduation has never been so universal as it is this season. We are all graduating into something strange and unknowable, scary and new. If we don’t have an actual grad in our family, we should find one and mentor them.
As Obama put it, “It’s also pulled the curtain back on another hard truth, something that we all have to eventually accept once our childhood comes to an end. All those adults that you used to think were in charge and knew what they were doing? Turns out that they don’t have all the answers. A lot of them aren’t even asking the right questions. So, if the world’s going to get better, it going to be up to you.”
One 2020 grad somewhere, with a firm grasp of the power of story-telling, will go on to write the definitive novel of her generation’s epic journey through this era, many more will be inspired to continue in science amid the search for vaccines and cures, and the best and the brightest will also make their contributions to the crucial field of public health, whose Canadian leaders — most of them women — now enjoy rock star status.
Pandemic 101 has given us many brutal truths. We’re heading on to the next level — an unknown world, an unpredictable summer and, despite knowing how hard we still have to work to keep ourselves and others healthy, maybe just an urge to let hope and joy have its moment.
What also gives me personal hope? Two newborn babies safely born into our extended families within the last month — a boy in Montreal and a girl in Toronto. They won the lottery but they don’t know it yet — surrounded by armies of love and extended family members who will heap encouragement on and protect them even from a distance in this perilous time, a stark contrast to rancid inequalities and injustices others face and that are being further perpetuated by this global health emergency.
I’ve also gorged on shared family videos of two slightly older tots — one leaping into a mountain of garden dirt in Montreal with a squeal of joy; another singing with delight securely in a carrier on her father’s back as her parents gratefully ventured out for a hike into the lush green French countryside near where they live, after their own pandemic lockdown that seemed to go on forever.
They bring pure joy but hope of a different sort.
These little newcomers are also part of the pandemic generation, and there’s no telling what on earth, given the chance to grow up in a safer world, they will accomplish.