Matthew Wieseltier ’20
May is normally the happiest month of a high school senior’s year. After worrying about the college process for years, come May 1st, they are left to worry about things like who they are going to prom with and what to wear to graduation.
Ask any high school senior what they are worried about right now, and they’ll tell you that they are worried about going for a walk outside because they might transmit the coronavirus to someone in their household. That their grandparents are in a nursing home with a high reported rate of infection. That their loved ones will die a preventable death in a hospital ill-equipped to help them, surrounded by people they do not know.
It is into such an America that the class of 2020 emerges. Caught off-guard by a virus that we were warned about months in advance, America was brought to its knees. Our healthcare system crumbled, with a government that seemed to actively undercut it for selfish political reasons. This administration’s failure to lead a coordinated federal response means that they have the blood of tens of thousands of Americans on their hands.
But the problems do not end there. People across the country have actively protested against lockdown orders meant to protect them, clamoring that their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens are less important than… their right to be less than six feet away from each other? Their right to … what, exactly?
No leader can rule without the support of the people, least of all in a democracy. A president is usually doomed without the support of their own party. So then is this really a problem with just our president? We, as a collective nation, should never have reached the point where a significant portion of our population simply ignores science.
The issues that we face today are not limited to just our leadership. Yes, this grossly incompetent administration could have done any number of things better to save more lives. But our issues run deeper than that. There are systematic, recurring problems in this country. This virus has proved that to both us and the world, crushing the antiquated idea of American exceptionalism. There is nothing exceptional about having the sixth-highest deaths per capita in the world (this statistic according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center).
There will of course be a reckoning once this is all over. Politicians will fight over who bungled this or that order of personal protective equipment, and blame will be thrown around aplenty for the failures of our healthcare infrastructure. However, once the dust settles, we will still be living in the same broken nation that allowed this crisis to transpire in the first place. There is no group of people, much less a single person, upon whom the blame can be placed for the current state of this country. This crisis is exposing a host of problems that have festered in this country for decades, if not more.
Americans must not look to assign blame, but rather we must begin to fix the host of issues that this crisis has exposed. By now it has become clear that we will not go back to the same society that existed before the pandemic. This new society has the potential to be better than the one that came before it, if only we make it so. We have learned so many valuable lessons during this ordeal about everything from healthcare to racial inequity, from education to the economy. To not learn from these lessons would be irresponsible at best, criminal at worst.
My message to my fellow graduates is as follows: it is important to rethink, but also to repair. It is on us, the next generation of leaders, health experts, and scientists, to bring about the change this country needs. This change is not necessarily political, but rather it is societal. America is no longer on top. Our job is not to maintain this country’s status, but to rebuild that status in the eyes of the world.
It is a common refrain in graduation speeches that it is that class’s turn to go out and change the country, or the world. If that is the case, the Class of 2020 has its work cut out for it.
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