What we owe the Class of 2020

Let’s turn our thoughts to the high school and college classes of 2020, young Americans who, in large numbers, lost their graduation ceremonies to Zoom. They were often deprived of the chance to say proper goodbyes, to hug and to party in ways they had a right to expect.

They enter a world shattered by a pandemic and its dire economic consequences. For many, the jobs they were offered simply disappeared. Those still looking for work encounter employers who have been doing more firing than hiring. And economists have shown that setbacks at the beginning of someone’s work life can limit opportunities and incomes for many years to come.

Their commencements, such as they were, are now being staged against a backdrop of rage over the killing of George Floyd. An African American, Floyd died because a white police officer named Derek Chauvin — charged Friday with third-degree murder and manslaughter — knelt on his neck and suffocated him. He ignored Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” Those were also the final words of Eric Garner, an African American man choked to death by a policeman in New York City in 2014.

The country they graduate into confronts an emergency that goes back to our very origins, what my Washington Post colleague Eugene Robinson called, with precision, “lifethreatening racism.”

Finally, the Class of 2020 will have to deal with — and if, God willing, they choose to vote, render a judgment upon — the presidency of Donald Trump.

Political scientists observe that our views over the long run are much affected by our reaction to the person in the White House when we get to voting age. In Trump, they have experienced a reckless, selfish, authoritarian and incompetent president determined to divide us. Shockingly but typically, his reaction to the civil disorder that followed Floyd’s killing was not to try to heal our wounds but to provoke and threaten.

My fear for you, class of 2020, is that the degradation of our public life will push you away from the joys of political action and self-rule — and, worse, to doubts about democracy itself.

My hope (and this, I promise, is the only commencement-style preaching I’ll subject you to) is that you’ll engage, not flee; organize, not hang back; imagine a better country, not resign yourself to things as they are. Your generation — in its diversity, its openness to difference, its rejection of intolerance, and its broad commitment to social equity — has the potential and the power to turn us around.

But there is a larger immediate responsibility on us older folks who are sticking you with unconscionable burdens. Our public policies tilt toward the economic interests of older Americans. This imbalance must be righted lest an entire generation of Americans — your

The Class of 2020 will have to deal with — and if, God willing, they choose to vote, render a judgment upon — the presidency of Donald Trump. generation — be weighed down for the rest of its working life by the after-effects of this moment.

Our social insurance programs for older people, principally Medicare and Social Security, are not matched by similarly comprehensive protections for the middle aged and the young. Also: Older people are wealthier, and our political system leans hard toward the haves over the have-nots.

The goal is not to strand older people with Social Security cuts, but to help the new generation rise up. After all, we have done this before.

The Depression Era Civilian Conservation Corps, at its peak, employed more than half a million young Americans. Now is the time to open national service opportunities wide, both because of great need and because service can provide a constructive transition to a period when jobs are more plentiful.

The GI Bill helped build our great post-World War II middle class. We need its equivalent — let’s call it the Next Generation Act of 2021. For starters, it would include job training for what will be a much-transformed post-pandemic economy; student loan forgiveness and wider access to higher education; comprehensive child care and early education; and seed money, similar to provisions of the GI Bill, for young people to start their own businesses.

But for our country to have any hope of thinking creatively and inclusively about how to move forward, we older folks need to be shamed by the young into abandoning a politics of racism, division and selfishness. In this strange commencement season, we should turn the podiums around. It will take the wisdom of young Americans to save their elders from our mistakes.