Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Fayette's Class of 2003, we salute you

By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

My household this week is one of many hundreds in Fayette in a higher than usual state of alert. The closer Friday gets, the closer we get to Red Alert.

Yes, it's Graduation Week. Four sets of Class of 2003 seniors dress up for baccalaureate services, prepare to endure commencement speakers and, for a few, seek to leave some visible graffiti or senior stunt signifying they indeed have passed this way. So it ever was.

Ah, those senior stunts. Forget the old paint-the-water-tower adventures; these seniors are likely to try for imaginative events. I remember the year they hauled a Volkswagen Bug on top of McIntosh High. That must have been hard work, not to mention illegal. And like the commercials warn, don't try that tired old trick again.

My all-time favorite is a simple stunt the Class of '87 concocted. McIntosh Principal Larry Raulerson, a class act, stood on the stadium stage to hand a diploma and extend a handshake to each graduate. He was not expecting that each of the several hundred seniors would hand him a penny with each handshake. He'd hand off a diploma and receive a one-cent piece in return. Pretty soon the principal ran out of sagging pockets filled with coppers and had to hand off the growing piles of pennies.

It was a good-humored gag that brought only smiles and no damage. Raulerson kept a big jar full of those pennies on his desk for years afterward, a remembrance of a classy senior class.

And that's what I think and hope for the Fayette Class of '03: Big hearts, good humor and great memories.

The column below rightly informs us parents of the challenges faced by our young men and women on their way to adulthood. A few of our kids will make disastrously bad choices, and the consequences may be awful. But most will veer away from the recklessness detailed below to begin their purposeful journey to maturity.

That journey begins with these glimmers of wisdom: Bad stuff can happen to ME, not just to other people. And this: Spur of the moment impulses can lead to lifelong losses.

These are post-9/11 kids, coming of age in a different world than their parents knew. They will have to be bolder in some ways than their parents, more resilient, not requiring a crisis counselor at every fork in the road or cloudy day. They will be more open-minded about many things, both a strength and a weakness.

Moral and cultural relativism are but two foes they will have to battle and overcome if their lives are to amount to anything beyond their immediate gratification. I expect the Class of '03 will have many victors in their future struggles.

Graduations have been signal events for centuries, personal milestones for the graduates, collective investments in our shared futures. Our hopes, our dreams are borne forward aboard new vessels, these children we love and now must relinquish.

Turning that tassel, tossing that mortar board, receiving that diploma still have meaning, even in these post-ironic days.

For that, and these our children, great God, we give thanks. Carry them, O Lord we pray, farther than we have ever gone, better than we have ever been.