The following remarks were addressed to the MICDS Class of 2024 after their graduation at Commencement on Sunday, May 19.
“Dear Class of 2024”—and I read to you here, particularly to the 120 of you who are alumni of our Middle School, from a letter never sent—“It is with extraordinary regret that I write to inform you of the cancellation of your Eighth Grade Celebration ceremony in accordance with the St. Louis County 2019 Novel Coronavirus Stay at Home Order. I am so very sorry for the loss of this important milestone in your MICDS experience. Yours, Mr. Rainey, May 4, 2020.”
Now that you are seniors (well, you were seniors a few minutes ago anyway), I hope you can understand why my focus that spring was trained almost exclusively on the senior Class of 2020 and the losses of their important MICDS milestones to the incipient pandemic. They did receive a letter from me—an emailed letter every evening, in fact, beginning the day after the County issued its Stay at Home Order. “I thought it might be fun,” I said to them in the first one, “to create a throwback playlist of music that was popular when I was a senior. I will add a new song to it each day, and I will call it ‘Mr Rainey’s 1987-88 Senior Mixtape.’” (Apple Music / Spotify)
It so happens that an early addition to that playlist was It’s The End Of The World As We Know It by the alternative rock band R.E.M., which resonated especially with the Class of 2020 in that moment, confined to their homes and uncertain of the path forward. (Ironically, it so happens as well that when I was in eighth grade—as you were in 2020—R.E.M. recorded a song called Letter Never Sent. Hindsight being 20/20, no pun intended, I wish I had made a “mixtape” playlist for your class, too, and put that song on it—but if I had thought to do that, then it probably would have occurred to me to send you that regretful note about the Eighth Grade Celebration cancellation in the first place.)
In 1925, the writer T.S. Eliot, a St. Louis native and grandson of our school’s founder, also contemplated the end of the world in his poem The Hollow Men. Its final verses, echoing the structure but subverting the innocence of the nursery rhyme “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” asserts:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The New York Times obituary for Eliot in 1965 declared, “These…are probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English. They are also the essence of Eliot as he established his reputation as a poet of post-World War I disillusion and despair.” I like to think of R.E.M.’s own lyric reckoning with the end of the world, remembering how it testified from boomboxes throughout my senior year of high school, as a defiant counterpoint to disillusion and despair—not only of the post-World War I variety, but post-World War II, post-sweeping genocidal massacres, post-Korean War and Vietnam War, post-1960s assassinations and unrest, post-1970s malaise, and mid-nuclear arms race. In the face of this woeful historical freight, the members of R.E.M.—Cold War babies all—nevertheless put “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” to different inspiration in 1987 than Eliot had 62 years earlier, singing:
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.
We should take very seriously this word “fine.” The world’s manufacture of rationales for disillusion and despair has persisted unabated in the decades since R.E.M. announced their refusal to be cowed by them; and has, regrettably, coincided with the gradual and seemingly universal acceptance of despondency as modern humanity’s default emotional state. In a critique of this pervasive acquiescence, subtitled How Everything Became Trauma, the writer Will Self observes that our contemporary concept of trauma “jumps the rails…to become not a marker of individual repression but the die stamped by history on the [collective] human psyche.” So ubiquitous today are apparent omens of the end of the world, and so immediate are they to our consciousness thanks to the smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions to which we tether our attention, that any person so mentally besieged is now unquestioningly justified in feeling anxious, triggered, unsafe, victimized, traumatized, or otherwise overcome by externalities—“infected with emotion in pandemonium” as Self puts it.
“Technologies of acceleration and specularity,” he writes—the gas pedals that are our clocks and calendars, the black mirrors that haunt our purses and pockets—“have massively increased the production of trauma.” Indeed, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls yours the “anxious generation” in a book of that title whose publication in March of this year has been met with widespread alarm. “Smartphones with high-speed internet and social media apps,” he contends, “created the new phone-based childhood,” which has entailed “four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.” What does the end of the world look like if not like this? How is it even possible to “feel fine” anymore?
I wish you had heard the remarks that Mr. Small gave to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades on Prize Day, just before our rehearsal of this ceremony. That annual celebration of achievement, like today’s, presumes, he said, “an even bigger imperative: what it means to be morally courageous.” Mr. Small recalled the young Freedom Riders of 1961 whose initial subjection to violence in the segregated South as they sought to defend the constitutional rights of its Black citizens led older civil rights advocates, including Martin Luther King Jr., to consider discontinuing the campaign. “And that might have been the end of it,” said Mr. Small, “if it had not been for the young people within the movement,” one of whom “argued that if ‘we let them stop us with violence, the movement is dead.’ So the Freedom Rides didn’t stop…. The majority of participants in the second wave were not much older than you… and exercised the moral courage to stand up for what they knew to be good and right.”
Mr. Small continued:
I share all of this because the need for morally courageous leadership is as great in this moment—your moment—as it has ever been. Many of the challenges of the 20th century have bled into the 21st and been compounded by a new host of daunting circumstances. Just as it took a group of students to ensure the success of the broader American civil rights movement, it is up to you whether our school community continues to live into its mission, our country continues to live into its promise, and our world successfully meets the challenges it faces. It will be you, and that is what and why we celebrate today. That is what we draw our hope towards.
How fortunate you all have been for Mr. Small’s own moral courage these last four years. What a gift his leadership has been to you.
I would suggest that between identifying the challenges facing our world and summoning the courage to address them now lies the intermediate step, in an anxious generation, of consciously and intentionally feeling fine—of disinfecting yourselves of “emotion in pandemonium” and recognizing that history is not necessarily catastrophe, that trauma is not necessarily normal, and that the lives of purpose and service to which our Mission commits us surely are not virtual. The difference between life happening to you and you happening to life is the difference between victimhood and feeling fine.
So here we go ’round the mulberry bush in 2024. This is my letter especially to you, four years belated but also, with any luck, still on time—and not just for the 120 but for all 150 of you—my valediction of hope for the good and promising young people you are:
It is always the end of the world
It is always the end of the world
It is always the end of the world
May you feel fine and be courageous.
Congratulations to the Class of 2024, and best wishes to all of you and your loved ones for a happy summer vacation.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M. (Apple Music / Spotify)