The Last Class Before Everything Changed

It’s graduation season. I’ve been seeing many people share photos of their loved ones walking across high school and college stages to receive diplomas. This week, I got to see my oldest niece receive her high school diploma. I even gifted her with a toad I caught on the football field, where we took photos with her afterward. I mean, I’ve got to stay on brand, right?

Twenty-five years ago, I graduated from Trinity High School in the bustling metropolis of Trinity, North Carolina. Growing up in Trinity, you told folks you were from High Point, the next-biggest town nearby. I’ve always lived in small towns where you had to qualify with other towns for people not from the area. Sitting in the bleachers watching all those new graduates really got me thinking about all that’s changed in the last quarter-century.

It seems like yesterday that I was walking across a similar stage to accept my diploma. The future was bright, I knew I wanted to be an environmental scientist, and I had already been accepted to a local university. It’s crazy how time flies and life changes in an instant.

My graduating class was the last one before America changed forever. Just a few months after we walked across the stage, we were attacked on 9/11. The next twenty years were wars and rumors of wars. It seems some things never change, given the current state of affairs. For the sake of the current class graduating, I hope this Middle Eastern war blows over quickly, and they find themselves chasing other dreams, not sandy apparitions.

The internet was relatively new to the common person. The screeching of dial-up modems signified our entry to the World Wide Web. We all loved hearing the creaking door sound effect when our crush would log on to AOL Instant Messenger. This was our form of social media. You had to be present. The announcement of “you’ve got mail” from America Online still brought joy. We rarely got emails back then, so they were still special.

School projects were done by scouring the Dewey Decimal System in the library and copying information from physical books. People talked in person, on the telephone, and connected in real life. Photographs were taken on film, and one-hour photo development was the epitome of quick media. We weren’t tethered to technology yet.

It’s exciting to think back on how we all had to adapt to an ever-changing world, and I’m sure every generation can look back and make similar “back in my day” claims. I look forward to watching the advances brought on by this generation. They are the future, and the world they know is nothing like ours. I wonder how much will change in the next twenty-five years. I trust that just as we had to evolve from the world we knew to the world that came, this new generation will likely do the same.

I’m very proud of my niece and her peers. Dream big, take risks, and make the world a better place. We’re counting on you!

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Bethania, North Carolina. His work has appeared in Dead Reckoning Collective, The Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, and other outlets, and he directed Hammer Down, a documentary about his 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom with Alpha Battery 5-113th of the North Carolina Army National Guard. For The Havok Journal, he often writes essays and reflections about war memory, veteran life, the outdoors, and everyday experience. You can find his books, collected works, and social media at www.stanlakecreates.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.