What I’m telling my graduating students
My students are graduating at a tremulous time.
The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars.
All of this coming after a pandemic that claimed the lives of over a million Americans. And after the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in history, provoked by the first president who refused to accept electoral defeat.
Perhaps most troubling, the nation is bitterly split. Americans are demonizing those on the other side with whom they disagree. (For two weeks in April, “Civil War,” a dystopian film about a bloody alternative reality where America is at war with itself, topped box office charts, grossing more than $50 million.)
My graduating students are exhausted and anxious.
They are repulsed by the slaughter in Gaza and angered by the responses of university administrators around the country to the student protesters.
They’re cynical about politics.
They tell me they don’t want to have children and bring them into a world imperiled by conflict and climate change and authoritarianism.
They have lived through mass shootings and culture wars.
They recall a Trump administration spewing hate and bigotry and giving tax cuts to the wealthy, and fear another President Trump who’s even less constrained.
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