Class of ’85

Thirty years ago I sat on my high school football field, draped in a light blue graduation gown, a mortar board bobby-pinned to my 17 year old head, listening to our commencement speaker (a minister,) drone on about the statistical diagnosis of the class of 1985. He cast an uninspiring message of death, divorce, failure, and bankruptcy. He talked about the world from the perspective of numbers, the Russian roulette message of motivational speakers, he predicted the odds against us, against our success, against our happiness.

Throughout the past thirty years, I have thought of that speech, of the sadness he threw upon the future, of the cruelty and (sometimes accuracy) of his forecast.