By Michael Swanger

 

Like other parents whose children will graduate from high school this spring, my wife and I are experiencing a range of emotions from pride and joy, to nostalgia and melancholy, as our son, John, completes a major milestone in his young life and will embark on the next one this fall when he leaves home to attend college. Before that happens, we have one more season of high school baseball to bridge the gap and to watch him circle the bases one more time. 

 

Last spring, our hearts went out to the Class of 2020 when their senior year was abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to affect everyone’s lives. Important traditions like prom and graduation, as well as other school activities were upended or cancelled. 

 

Iowa made national news when it became the only state to allow high school baseball and softball to be played last summer as players and parents relished a semblance of normalcy. None of us who were at those games will forget the protocols put in place last season, including limited attendance, players, coaches and fans wearing masks, alternating rows of bleachers closed off to promote safe social distancing and teams losing games, players, or their seasons to outbreaks of COVID-19. It was a spring and summer defined by an ever-changing “new normal.”

 

Little did we know at the time, however, that the pandemic would profoundly alter the entire school year for the Class of 2021. It forced prolonged periods of quarantine during which classes wavered between online and in-person learning depending on rates of infection as school and government officials argued which method was better. It led to yet more cancellations of activities like homecoming, football games and the state jazz championships. It hampered opportunities to socialize with peers from behind a mask, leading to increased isolation. It affected students academically, mentally and physically. It limited college campus visits and ACT testing. It curtailed or eliminated part-time employment opportunities for students. And it was the cause of illnesses and deaths. In short, one could argue, it defined the senior year for the Class of 2021 and perhaps a generation. 

Conversely, the challenges created by the pandemic have made Generation Z stronger: more resilient, independent, creative, self-motivated and appreciative of the simple things in life. They will carry the hard-earned lessons of the pandemic with them for the rest of their lives, which will serve them well as productive members of society.

 

This year’s graduating class is not the first to face obstacles, nor will it be the last. But alongside the Class of 2020, they are the first in a century to endure a worldwide pandemic of this magnitude. 

 

Consider the classes of 1920 and 1921. Both were in high school when World War I was raging before it ended in November 1918. That same year, the 1918 influenza pandemic, better known as the “Spanish Flu,” began in February before it concluded in April 1920. Additionally, a depression sank the economy in 1920 and 1921 as businesses closed while inflation and interest rates spiked. Eventually, the economy would rebound for several years before the stock market crashed in 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression. 

 

What’s more, a vaccine was not available to combat the spread of the Spanish Flu, nor was there a consensus among medical experts on how to treat the ill. During the fall of 1918, the Iowa Board of Health quarantined the state, ceasing all public gatherings, as Iowans were encouraged to wear masks and practice social distancing. Yet it also advised killing bacteria by hanging bedsheets sprinkled with diluted formaldehyde in the middle of a room and drinking water boiled with onions.

 

During its two-year course, the Spanish Flu killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide, 675,000 of whom were U.S. citizens and more than 7,500 Iowans. That included 702 soldiers at Camp Dodge.

 

At the time of me writing this column, globally there have been more than 2.8 million deaths due to COVID-19, including 554,000 U.S. citizens. In Iowa, 5,835 deaths related to COVID-19 have been reported. 

 

The historical significance of this last year is not lost on the Class of 2021. Likely, the Class of 1921 had a similar awareness of their place in history. 

 

In her commencement address at Iowa State College in 1921, Carrie Chapman Catt, Iowa’s leading suffragist, said:

 

“Time was when graduates would be congratulated upon so happy a condition, and merely advised to live good and honest lives, that was long ago. The world known more now and it expects more. A very great Englishman, Bishop Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s, recently said a thing which most elders of many nations have been thinking: ‘I have not viewed the generation of which I have been a part as a particularly easy or victorious one, but I confess that I look forward with great anxiety to the journey through life which my children will have to make.’”

 

For John and his classmates, I hope their twenties roar. 

 

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