Family members of the La Conner High School graduating class of 2021 will attend this year’s graduation ceremonies Friday at 5 p.m in the football stadium. Teachers and staff will be there, but few others. Attendance is limited to keep people safe from the last vestiges of the coronavirus, not quite wrung out of our community or society at large.

The 54 teens – the largest graduating class in years – will graduate together, sitting shoulder to shoulder, throwing their hats in the air en masse, getting to hug and kiss each other, and also cry. It is very different, and distant, from graduation 2020, when seniors were delivered by families in cars, one at a time, to walk alone, as always, to get their diploma, but then to leave with family instead of joining their peers for a shared last hurrah.

These two classes are very fortunate. Their very real difficulties these last 15 months: no in-person classes, kept from campus, meeting on computer screens, always wearing masks when with others, have created experiences they did not want and will not forget. They have provided larger-than-life lessons.

Best to not dismay over or name as negative these students’ struggles and altered paths they were required to take. Instead, consider the gift this year’s class, and last year’s – and every student at every age level – has been given.

They have learned that life is not a bed of roses. That is a cliché. But true: They have not had a smooth path to their futures.

Maybe they are learning that which does not kill us, makes us stronger. That is a cliché, too. Hopefully they will find that their decisions and actions make that statement true.

While they have gone through stresses and discomfort, they have found that they need to depend on others and that they need to fend for themselves. Hopefully, every parent, guardian, teacher and staff member was available when this year’s seniors most needed support. Most households, and this school district and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, offer considerable resources.

Consider if they lived in Afghanistan, which has been at war since invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. They did not grow up in Vietnam, which from the 1940s underwent 30 years of war, or in El Salvador, which is still traumatized by its 1970s civil war, as is Nicaragua.

They do not live in Syria or Iraq or anywhere in Latin America. Whether these seniors go to college or into the military or take an apprenticeship or get a job, they venture forth into a fairly stable future, as their – and most Americans – lives have always been.

Their year of disruption is a lesson. How fortunate young people are to have massive society-wide misfortune front and center in their lives and for only a relatively short period of time.

Our society’s shortcomings have been unmasked by the pandemic: our lack of preparedness, our inability to unify, some neighbors challenging science and public health. These are cracks in our culture that unnecessarily cost 600,000 lives.

Larger fissures are more glaringly exposed: inequity and racism, attacks on truth and democracy. The distance between the rhetoric of the American dream and the reality of so many not being able to reach for that dream has been exposed and now experienced by even the children in this community.

Society is unmasked in a different, fundamental way. And our high school seniors, with this experience in their lives, clearly see how fragile the world is and how quickly and completely their world can be turned upside down and normal life upended.

They are now experiencing that life just as quickly returns to normal and how readily people embrace the status quo and how easily trauma and pain are forgotten by society at large.

What will they remember? What has become ingrained in their habits, perspectives and personalities?

What will they do with the knowledge they have gained, once they figure out this puzzle that is the country they live in?