By Scott Wheeler

High school graduation is a day many people look forward to from the day they walk into kindergarten — the day that they’ll have no more school. In reality, graduation is only the beginning of life, which, if lived right, is an ongoing education.

            On Saturday my last child, Emily, will graduate from North Country Union High School, the same year that her mother, Penny, and I celebrate the 25^th year since we graduated from high school. In the last few weeks I have reflected not only upon Emily’s life, and the life of her two brothers, Curtis and Nick, who have since gone on to graduate from college and are now living in Maine, but on their generation.

            With Emily destined for the University of Maine at Orono this fall, my wife and I are about to enter a new chapter in our lives — as empty-nesters. Although I look at this current generation with great optimism, I also look at the challenges they face. Sadly, some of their biggest challenges come from people in their own lives including us, the generations that came before them. Many of us are so willing to see the faults in today’s young people we don’t see all the greatness and potential they possess. The knowledge that many of them not only possess, but are able to use, amazes me.

            However, it seems like a generational tradition that some of the members of preceding generations romanticize the days when they were young, as they stand in their glass houses and gaze back longingly through rose-colored glasses. It’s amazing that the lenses of those colored glasses hide their own personal blemishes, at least to the wearers, but accentuate and exaggerate the flaws of the young people who are speeding toward adulthood. The following is a diary entry I found.

            “Nowadays, when a young man seeks to make a start in life, he looks around for a clerkship, or some soft job in which he can keep his clothes nice and his hands soft. In Mr. Cargill’s time it was different. Then it seemed to be the proper thing for a young man starting in for himself to strike out into the wilderness, select his location, and there literally [carved] out a home for himself and family. Hard work did not terrify them.”

            In reading the previous quote one might think that it was written by an eternal pessimist in 2009, but it wasn’t. It is from a diary entry of a woman who lived in the Charleston-Island Pond area during the mid to late 1800s. I have another diary entry of a person musing about the lazy young people of “today.” In her writing, the person frets that she doesn’t know what is going to happen to a world that is going to rely on the young people of that time to take the lead — a lazy, young, shiftless people. That writer recorded her memories in the 1930s. That lazy generation not only survived the Great Depression but went on to battle in World War II, essentially saving the world from a mad man. Yes, that lazy generation became known as the “Greatest Generation.”

            To the graduates, including my daughter, I encourage you not only to work hard, but to dream, and to believe in yourselves, and to shoot for the stars. If you fall on your face, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and look at it as a learning experience, an education in its own, and refocus on those stars.

            You will also run into negative people who want to rain on your day, some who want you to fail. Remember very often their attacks on you and your reputation has really nothing to do with you, but it is often the naysayers’ way of trying to make up for their feelings of inadequacy in their own lives, a feeling that they have failed. These pessimists and rumormongers want to drag you down in a twisted attempt to pull themselves up. Ignore their poisonous words and continue to follow your dreams.

            To the members of the class of 2009, your lives have just begun! Enjoy life! It’s what you want to make of it. Make the best of it for you and the people around you. On your life’s journey, when you see people down on their luck, pick them up, brush them off, and help build them up. Try to find the goodness in the people around you and don’t waste your time knocking people down. Most of all, in a few years when you are tempted to criticize the younger generation, remember it was only a few years earlier that some people of the generations that went before you were casting stones at you from their glass houses. Instead, praise and encourage those young people and honor them for the goodness that many of them will bring to the world, the same goodness that many of you bring to the world.

            Congratulations, Class of 2009.