May you live in interesting times

Right around the time the Class of 2003 entered college - months shy of the new millennium - the news media bombarded the public with fatalistic predictions of doom and chaos. No, they were not warning us against an imminent nuclear war or the coming of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. A more mundane event was apparently threatening our way of life: computers all over the world would not be able to recognize the year 2000, thinking time had reverted to 1900! Boy, were we damned or what? Within the circuits of our own robotic progeny laid the seeds of our destruction.

Fortunately, however, all those last-minute runs to the grocery store to buy extra gallons of water, extra cans of soup, and maybe even some duct tape - always reliable against external threats - proved to be futile. The world didn't collapse, we were still alive, and most importantly, our computers were still up and running. The Y2K bug story turned out to be a hoax... or did it?

We may have felt relief to see that everything appeared normal during the first few days of the 21st century. But that was about to change pretty soon. As any graduating senior can tell you, his or her years in college, which have coincided with the first years of the new millennium, have been filled with bizarre and catastrophic incidents.

Throughout their college years, today's graduating seniors have witnessed an inordinate number of strange historic events, many of which have changed their lives - and ours - forever. Perhaps the Y2K chaos predictions were mistaken in terms of delivery and timing, but not magnitude. Here are a few tragic and unfortunate events over the last four years.



The 2000 Presidential Election: Americans had not completely recovered from the moral hangover of the Monica Lewinsky affair when the national trauma of the 2000 election hit them by surprise. Of course, this election was supposed to be unusually tight, but everybody expected a swift and quick result. Instead, the outcome of the election remained unknown for over a month, until the US Supreme Court decided in favor of George W. Bush.

Who can forget those long hours watching CNN at the dorms, waiting for the anchors to call a state for Bush or Gore, only to take it back in a matter of minutes? It really makes no difference whether you wanted Gore or Bush to win. Everyone in this country experienced something they had never experienced before: we realized American democracy was not perfect, that this country was no different than any other country that struggles with a democratic system.

September 11, 2001: We will never forget where we were when we first found out. We were here, at Tufts, in our rooms or in the Campus Center. We will never forget the images of two planes crashing into the Twin Towers. We watched those images in horror with our roommates, our friends, and our professors. We were all afraid, and we all knew that our lives had changed significantly from that very moment. It was a time of mourning, sadness, and fear. We struggled to make sense out of what happened. Abruptly, we were introduced to a new era, in which security concerns surpassed all others. Our world had changed in ways we had not expected.

The War in Iraq: Our generation will also be marked by war. Not long after US military forces defeated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan - by all means, a just and necessary war - the Bush administration decided to turn to the Persian Gulf and oust Saddam Hussein. The prelude to the war was both longer and more controversial than the war itself.

Nonetheless, we experienced a vigorous debate on the wisdom of going to war here at Tufts, and that had a powerful impact on all of us. We discussed politics passionately and we learned to listen to those who have different opinions than ours, if only to search for holes in their arguments. The immediate reasons to go to war are still questionable - weapons of mass destruction have not yet turned up - but we can all agree that we have witnessed an important shift in US foreign policy, wherein the United States will throw its weight around the world in a more assertive manner.



Indeed, we have all lived through interesting times over the past four years. The images of these events will stay with us for the rest of our lives, and will be inevitably associated with today's graduating seniors' college experience.

"May you live in interesting times" is said to be an ancient Chinese curse, but I think that it can be interpreted differently. It is in times of crisis that the best opportunities arise to change things for the better. Today's seniors have been marked by times of peril and distress, but they should be optimistic. No matter how bad things look in our lives we can count on our human spirit to overcome difficulties. Remember what William Faulkner said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."