Last week a Berryville paper published yearbook headshots of the graduating seniors in our county’s high schools, in order of size, Berryville, Green Forest, Eureka Springs and Clear Spring. Berryville kids were in formal wear – photographers use fake tuxedo tops for boys and off the shoulder gown tops for girls. Green Forest grads wore semi-formal – boys in coat and tie, girls in nice dresses. The Eureka bunch wore their school clothes – hoodies, t-shirts, or whatever. (I wonder if they had pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers.) Senior pictures are a big deal; students include them in invitations, give them to relatives and favorite teachers.
What these two or three hundred photos share is the promise of youth, smiling faces with dimples or serious ones staring straight into the lens. Some surnames are German, Dutch or Italian, but mostly Anglo or Scots-Irish. Some are common names throughout the Ozarks; some are more recent arrivals, particularly Hispanic names. These young men and women are ready to launch themselves into the so-called real world from the artificiality of high school. (When our youngest graduated, she commented that “just walking across that stage, suddenly makes you an adult.”)
But the class of covid-19 will not likely have traditional commencement exercises, at least not before July 1, according to Governor Hutchinson, and possibly not then, if the pandemic rears its ugly head again as forecast. We like traditions and rituals, and graduation is a major milestone for Americans, as well as big business.
2020 graduates long ago paid for overpriced senior rings, caps and gowns, invitations. Some have rented banquet facilities or scheduled receptions at church halls, state parks, or restaurants. Those embossed invitations, with enclosed snapshots, are an invitation to reward the graduates with gifts or cash money. Oh well.
This year is especially disappointing for Berryville, which opened its new high school in January; these seniors would have been the first class to walk from the new building. Oh well.
In a larger sense, however, this class faces newfound adulthood as a more serious enterprise than their predecessors. Most are eligible to vote for the first time this November. Until they become independent thinkers, young people’s belief systems are formed by parents and family, church, and school, especially peers and extracurricular activities – teams, band, clubs.
I retired from teaching in 2016. I was proud that my students did not know who I supported in the election, as I considered my role not to influence their choices but to defend their own ideas and decisions. That spring, I badgered one very smart senior to explain the fourth word in the slogan “Make America Great Again.” I had other students who were enamored of Bernie Sanders, but when they spoke about policy, their ideas were closer to Republican Party views. No clue that GOP was anti-democratic socialism.
This year voters, including those who vote for the first time, have a responsibility to transcend sloganeering and analyze the dire problems surrounding us. For years certain politicians have pooh-poohed climate change; income inequality based on corporate greed, racism, and geography; an unaffordable health-insurance complex, which have become glaringly evident in the pandemic. The notion that we might label scary situations “fake news” and careen toward disaster so the rich can stay rich is effective propaganda, embraced by a small vocal constituency.
Students graduating in Carroll County happen to live in one of the unhealthiest, least educated states in the nation, one which embraces not merely conservative and/or libertarian ideology not necessarily bad) but too often believes that them who are not white heterosexual, God-fearing, gun-toting, folks who fail to see the irony between “pro-life” and “pro death penalty” are evil.
My final year teaching, I rode home on a school bus from EAST conference and conversed with two class leaders, popular scholar-athletes, one male, one female. They believed – which appears to be typical of their generation – that even though they did not endorse atheism or homosexuality, it didn’t bother them. Live and let live.
Our hope always lies with youth. We won’t have valedictory speeches from graduation stages, but we can hope these kids will examine reality and vote for positive change.
Kirk Ashworth