Graduates, My Generation Wrecked So Much That’s Precious. How Can I Offer You Advice?

NYT OPINION: Graduates, My Generation Wrecked So Much That’s Precious. How Can I Offer You Advice?
By Margaret Renkl
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 15, 2023 at 03:00AM

My only response is that age has exactly one advantage over the energy and brilliance of youth.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — Thirty-nine years ago, my college commencement was held in an un-air-conditioned gymnasium on the hottest day Alabama could serve up. I tried to talk my family into letting me skip the ceremony, but my grandmother, a retired schoolteacher, put her foot down. “We’re going,” she said. So we went. All I remember of the whole day is trying not to perish in the hallucinogenic heat.

My grandmother began her career in a two-room country schoolhouse. She was still teaching 40 years later when Alabama public schools were finally integrated. What my grandmother knew, and I did not, is that it’s right to celebrate a hard-won achievement. It’s right to drink in the pride of family and friends. It’s always right to give yourself over to joy every single time joy is on offer.

It is also right in this liminal moment, this time of looking both before and beyond, to ponder what it all means. What did the years of study and camaraderie really add up to? What new challenges will you be obliged to face in the years to come?

I can’t tell you what it all meant, but I think I understand some of the difficulties that lie ahead.

You are children of the 21st century, and yours is the first generation to recognize the inescapable urgency of climate change, the first not to deny the undeniable loss of biodiversity. You have grown up in an age permeated by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle, by needless political polarization, by devastating gun violence, by the isolating effects of “social” media. You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back. You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself — and none of it is your fault.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/letter-to-graduates-hope-despair.html