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06/16/2021 07:00 AMThe masks came off before the caps did.
The Daniel Hand High School (DHHS) Class of 2021 didn’t experience anything like a normal year. Bounced between hybrid and remote classes, watching sports and extracurriculars submit to the unpredictable winds of quarantine requirements and restrictions, it would have been hard for the casual observer to deduce it on June 11, when hundreds of family and community members gathered on the Town Green for a graduation ceremony that was exceptional only for how normal it was.
It was an incredibly welcome return to tradition for many, contrasting starkly with last year’s drive-up ceremony at the school itself where students (for the most part) huddled around their cars, substituting honking horns for hollers of applause.
A time traveler from 2019 would have noticed a few odd things. Four or five large folding tables offered paper masks and hand sanitizer. The families who camped out on beach chairs seemed to keep a specific, marked distance from other groups. There was maybe less hugging than you might have expected from such a joyful occasion.
But for the most part, the Class of 2021—and the Madison community in general—seemed ready to turn their gaze forward, focusing not on the tribulations of the near-past but the optimism of the near-future.
Though DHHS Principal T.J. Salutari’s remarks were very much entrenched in the rhetoric of the pandemic, focusing on resilience, transitioning, and the specific battles of the “challenging world” of the last year, many of the students who spoke made it very clear they weren’t letting these things define their celebration.
“I could get up here and talk about that overwhelming, colossal, malignant, ulcerating, socially distanced, double-vaccinated elephant in the room. But to do so would be pointless,” said DHHS senior Henry Wilson. “To do that would be to let an abstract concept define our year.”
With a watermelon beach ball bouncing over the maskless mass of graduates, younger siblings skittering down the aisles of folding chairs, and parents with oversized cameras jockeying for position around the stage, the Class of 2021 certainly didn’t have a ceremony defined by the pandemic. Though COVID-19 itself remains far from an “abstract concept,” the students’ decision to define themselves by more than their pandemic-altered senior year showed a kind of resilience that is maybe hard for many adults to truly understand.
Though she did not avoid speaking about the pandemic, Class Essayist Lisa Liang’s narrative remained softly traditional, spending time contrasting the growth of her classmates from their freshmen years, and trying to define the qualities of a DHHS student—themes that any other year might seem rote.
“The Hand community is where you will find students who volunteer for community events,” Liang said. “Even when it’s pouring rain and the ocean windchill makes the 40-degree weather feel like below freezing...[people] will cheer each other on from the stands or on the field, rain or shine.”
Liang noted in her remarks that DHHS students were key in organizing a Black Lives Matter protest last summer, which turned a harsh gaze on some of the town’s issues with racial diversity and acceptance.
But the Class of 2021’s desire to move on and shed the heaviness of these kinds of questions was embodied in Salutatorian Josh Israel’s attempt to inject humor into that issue.
“Many people complain that Madison isn’t diverse enough,” he said. “As I overlook a crowd of sunburnt faces and fake tans, I’d say you’re right.”
Israel went on to say that he felt Madison “made up for” the lack of racial diversity with “diversity of thought” and through interactions with people of different perspectives.
Valedictorian Kyle Northrup opened with a cheeky bit of sideways humor himself, thanking DHHS teacher Larry Bell for teaching students about “the grave public health threat posed by—the milk industry.”
But he also took time to thank DHHS teachers sincerely for doing “jobs they didn’t want and didn’t sign up for so we could continue learning,” also highlighting the difficulties faced by everyone from cafeteria staff to parents during the 2020-’21 school year.
The feeling both from the ceremony itself and the remarks of those invited to speak was not of avoidance, not ignoring the realities that made the Class of 2021 a uniquely placed group of young people in the last century. Instead, Wilson made their focus explicit—that while the particular emotions experienced by the 284 young adults ending their high school careers now, under current unprecedented circumstances are “entirely valid,” there are more things connecting them to their strange new world than there are things separating them from it.
“The amalgamations of feelings inside you right now...has been felt before by millions of people in towns like Madison and in countries thousands of miles away,” he said. “Right now, and 30 years ago, and 50 years ago, and 500 years from now, there will be people feeling the exact same way as you.”