For my senior year, my first class every day was AP Physics, and my teacher had a small poster located in very close proximity to his classroom flag. The poster had a stock image of a velociraptor above text reading “Velociraptor = Distraptor / Timeraptor.” Classic physics joke. I always stood there silently with my hands by my sides looking at that poster during the daily pledge. When we were told to rise for the national anthem at my graduation ceremony last night, I thought about that poster.
It felt like any other pledge, and the majority of my preparations for the end of my senior year of high school felt like any other day. Final assignments, papers, and tests all felt like nothing I wasn’t used to. Sitting through my peers’ speeches was different that usual, but it was easy. I felt a few butterflies flitting around in my stomach shortly before rising to join the line of students waiting to receive their diplomas, and that was it. It was like I was a complete natural at the experience of high school, and in many ways, I guess I was. I wasn’t walking across that stage with three cords, two stoles, one medal and, lest we forget, a cap and gown for no reason. In some way or another, I think I won high school.
When I got home, I got to read updates about a horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. I had first read about it sometime before the ceremony when only a few children were confirmed dead from the massacre. The number had reached the teens and included teachers by the time I had gotten home after the ceremony. Today I got to read pleas from political pundits suggesting turning schools into heavily guarded, logistically nonsensical obstacle courses to prevent shootings instead of actually doing anything that would keep the weapons perpetrating said shootings out of the hands of the cruel and unstable. In August I’ll be moving into a dorm at Kent State University, known across the country as ‘that school where kids got shot’ if Star Wars doesn’t completely overtake your mental function every May 4.
Some things don’t change. But some things do, in small and subtle ways that will soon spread and explode into something much bigger than itself.
