In a time when Google wasn’t yet invented and Facebook was nothing but an idea in a 9-year-old boy’s head, a group of children were entering the world. In 1993, when the Buffalo Bills were preparing to lose their third Super Bowl in a row and Meat Loaf was on the top of the charts, a group of babies was born. They would become the Waltham High School Class of 2011.
They would grow up in an environment far more connected to their peers and the rest of the world than that of their parents. With military interventions in Somalia, Yugoslavia and Bosnia and trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, their lives were starting to move toward a more connected world.
They started kindergarten in 1998, the year the Lunar Prospector found evidence of frozen water on the moon, Google was founded, and researchers isolated an enzyme that could slow aging.
The Good Friday Peace pact brought two sides together in Northern Ireland; Europeans decide on one currency, the Euro; and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire chased the home run record in a summer that thrilled sports fans.
In 2007, they entered high school, and began the awkward period where they straddled the line between child and adult. By this time, many had Facebook accounts, and they had become master navigators of the Internet, in ways that bewildered their parents.
With instant message conversations and links from YouTube (two years old by then) they were explorers of the Internet, sifting through the countless number of websites to learn, play, share and collaborate with other users. In September 2007, as the school year began a new video game called Halo 3 was released, generating $170 million in revenue in its first day released. Suddenly with a click of a button, owners of the game could play with a friend across the globe.
And then there was the mystical tale of Harry Potter – a mirror into the minds of adolescent readers across the globe. The series was a heartwarming fantasy chronicling the rise of young boy to adulthood. The series, which had taken the heart of so many young children, debuted when the Class of 2011 was in kindergarten and ended as they entered high school. Both the readers and the protagonists were going through the same troubles, involved with growing up. The readers were meant to make connections with the book, and learn from the constant theme of friendship against evil. When the final book was released that summer of 2007, more than 11 million people from around the world purchased it in the first 24 hours of its release.
The Class of 2011 is graduating in a very different world from that of which they were born. They witnessed an incredible expansion in connections between people of different cultures and countries by realizing these people share the same troubles, goals and characteristics that make them human.
As they graduate this June, we hope they appreciate how much change can occur in a mere two decades. In fact, it doesn’t take too much effort to think back to a time when the Red Sox hadn’t won a championship in nearly a century and America didn’t have a “war on terror.”
Now it’s time for the graduating students of 2011 to look to the future and try to change the world just as their predecessors did.
Evan Koslof
6/9/11
Originally Posted: http://www.wickedlocal.com/waltham/news/x2077197279/EDITORIAL-The-Class-of-2011-grows-up#axzz1OodTXdql (Waltham).
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http://www.wickedlocal.com/newton/homepage/x1725637169/Newton-TAB-editorial-Congratulations-Class-of-2011#axzz1OodTXdql (Newton).
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