Our View: Seniors take turn in pandemic whirl

Quite a few are suffering because of the order to stay at home and quarantine in place. So many, in fact, that it's hard to keep up with all the sympathy we have for those suffering.

But right about now our hearts go out to high school seniors, who are being denied prom, spring sports, senior banquets and a normal graduation ceremony with all your classmates.

High school seniors are a rare breed. By the time a student reaches 12th grade, they are no longer children, yet not quite adults either. They are ready and able to assume the responsibilities of the adult world, yet are still living at home with parents.

But the rite of passage that is graduation changes all that. It's a milestone, marking the achievement of finishing your basic education with people you've probably known for years. After graduation, some go off to college while others head into the working world. Students can't help feeling that graduation marks the end of childhood and an entry into the real world. And this year, graduates won't experience the magic of high school graduation that many of us remember so clearly.

We'd like to tell them that graduation is just an event, a brief ceremony - that it won't matter years from now - that time will heal the wound of losing out on the opportunity to walk across the stage with a diploma in hand.

But we can't. We are sympathetic to them. It's a small comfort, but to Esko, Cloquet, Barnum, Wrenshall, Cromwell-Wright, Carlton, Fond du Lac Ojibwe and Moose Lake seniors: know that we feel your pain. But we also encourage you to make the best of it and know that the story of your graduation experience, in whatever form it takes, will be unique and one to tell your own children again and again.

The seniors get it. You can see it those we talked to the past week. In the comments on the back pages of this issue, you can see the loss they feel. But they also show resolve and empathy for the overall health of the community.

Those comments how us, indeed, that our seniors are ready to take on the world, no matter what it throws at them.

We wish you good health and success in your future, whatever it may hold for you.

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