End of the semester as anticlimax

At around 10:30 last night, shortly after Graham and I finished watching another episode of Columbo, Natalie hit send and submitted the last paper of her junior year at Yale. What an anticlimax. This kind of thing should be punctuated by a little joyous excess with one's friends, who hopefully have done much the same thing around the same time. A last round of drinks and fun before getting organized to head to the airport or the interstate to get home for the holidays.

Instead, she just pressed a button. It is very sad how much is being taken from our children by this pandemic. The rhythms of their lives are being inexorably altered. I have told Natalie that she should be open to planning a year of whatever in New Haven, waiting tables, working some middling job around the university, to have some of the fun she should have had as a student and to firm up friendships. I need to reiterate that offer.

There are times, I will confess, when I am disappointed in what she's studying. It sounds all too much like what the Right lampoons universities for: an undifferentiated morass of interdisciplinary neo-Marxist, post-feminist, intersectionality claptrap. But at the same time I see that she works really hard, learns a lot, reads an incredible amount, does good things in her extracurriculars (which is more than could be said for me) and that her heart is in the right place. So I try to go easy. I just need to plug gaps where I can and accept that the world changes.

And to return to the second paragraph above, when I bemoan how much is being taken from our children, I am well aware that it pales before what is not offered to so many children at all, and that many kids from less fortunate households are being hurt by the pandemic even worse. I'm thinking of any household where there's not a lot of space to spread out and not a lot of books and a culture of learning, so black and brown kids but also rural ones as well as just flat out philistines and troglodytes. That's what we need to work on going forward, and there's lots of work to do.