Weekly Column: Celebrating Idaho Graduates

It is graduation season: Idaho graduates are lining up in gymnasiums, on football fields and various other stages to accept their diplomas and celebrate the achievement of this milestone with their loved ones.

Graduates are inheriting a world with challenges but also great opportunities. While the challenges may be different than the ones their parents faced, they are also not that different. We all are alike in the sense that we all want to carve out a successful life, whatever that may look like—whether it is getting married and raising a family, or something else; or going to college, a trade school or graduate school and then choosing a career and pursuing it, or something else. Happiness and fulfillment are a common aspiration, and striving to do good, no matter what a person chooses to do, is a universal, admirable pursuit.

Graduates have proven they can prepare for the challenges ahead and make the most of their opportunities. Congratulations on building a strong foundation. You have so many great things ahead of you. I wish you all the best in reaching the goals you have set and those yet imagined.

Every graduation season, my heart is with the parents, grandparents and other guardians, who are celebrating their child’s graduation, often with tears in their eyes. Seeing your children embark on their next chapters is both fulfilling and uncomfortable. At graduation ceremonies, you stand shoulder to shoulder with other parents and guardians wishing for their graduate’s success while also already missing their closeness.

May you find comfort in knowing you poured the best of your life’s work into the person your child is becoming. They carry your words and guidance with them. Some of these lessons are immediately clear, while some will emerge at the right time. Thank you for the love and encouragement you put into raising and guiding the future of our great country.

At a commencement speech 45 years ago, President Ronald Reagan offered words that could be shared as timeless comfort and encouragement with graduates today: “And while you will look back with warm pleasure on your memories of these years that brought you here to where you are today, you are also, I know, looking at the future that seems uncertain to most of you but which, let me assure you, offers great expectations. . . . We need you. We need your youth. We need your strength. We need your idealism to help us make right that which is wrong. Now, I know that this period of your life, you have been and are critically looking at the mores and customs of the past and questioning their value. Every generation does that. May I suggest, don't discard the time-tested values upon which civilization was built simply because they're old. More important, don't let today's doomcriers and cynics persuade you that the best is past, that from here on it's all downhill. Each generation sees farther than the generation that preceded it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You're going to have opportunities beyond anything that we've ever known.”

This graduation season, I commend Idaho graduates on achieving this milestone, as they learn, live and grow into their positions in our world. I wish them all the best as they realize their “opportunities beyond that we’ve ever known.”

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