Tomgram: Graduation Day with Howard Zinn

 

It's a beautiful day in May. The sun is streaming down; the birds are on their migration paths north; the first day lilies are just breaking into bloom -- and students are gathering for their graduation ceremonies on an afternoon when everything seems just right in a world where so much seems so wrong. These are the students who began their college lives within weeks, possibly days, even hours of that moment when, on September 11, 2001, the first hijacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Certainly they -- above all classes of recent times -- have the right to peer into a murky future and wonder, with a certain trepidation, what's in store for them. Through no fault of their own, they have earned the right to discouragement, even perhaps despair.