Editorial
Class of 2008

According to some statistics, there are more than 3 million high-school seniors graduating this year. And as we should all know each member of a class is different, but there are some things that most members will share regardless of if they graduated from Oakmont, Monty Tech or Cushing.

These students stepped into their kindergarten classrooms as 5-year-olds in September of 1995. But before they walked through that door they were coming in with certain worldviews.

For this class, Germany has always been one country as it re-unified in October of 1990, the year many were born, and by December of the following year the USSR was also no more.

As the world entered a new Millennium, the members of the Class of 2008 were focused not on Y2K but instead of perils of fourth grade. During their years in elementary school their parents had watched the "Trial of the Century" (when O.J. Simpson stood trial for murder) and a president impeached.

By middle school the world had changed, when terrorist attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, (the first month these students were in sixth grade) and by the time they left Overlook as eighth-graders the country was in its second year of war in Iraq.

As they walked across the stage on Sunday, there was no curse of Babe Ruth hanging over Red Sox Nation. That was broken the fall they entered high school.

But now as the Class of 2008 steps out of the charted waters of school to move on to higher education, the military or the workforce, they will be the ones creating the future.

It will do us each well to remember that feeling of walking across the stage (or gym floor) to get our diploma and feeling the world is out our feet.

Graduation is not the ending but it is the commencement - the beginning. It is the first step on a journey that we are all still travelling.

Take a moment and figure out what advice you would give as part of the high school commencement address and then figure out if you are living it.