Four years ago, a lethal contagion spread across the United States. A plague of cowardice far deadlier than the coronavirus gripped school administrators throughout the land. And it claimed among its victims the high school seniors of 2020, who saw their graduation ceremonies canceled amid the panic.
This spring, many of those same high school seniors of 2020 stand poised to graduate from college.
Sadly, however, in some places, they now face a new variant of that familiar contagion.
In a viral video posted on the social media platform TikTok on Thursday, one University of Southern California senior used words such as "comical" and "shock" to describe freshly received news that her school once again had deprived her of a graduation ceremony.
According to KTLA-TV, the Los Angeles university canceled the ceremony because of safety concerns stemming from anti-Israel protests on campus.
Last week, USC canceled the traditional commencement speech from valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a 21-year-old pro-Palestinian activist.
Now, against the backdrop of ugly developments on campuses across the country, school officials decided to scrap the ceremony altogether.
Ten minutes after the notification email arrived in students' inboxes, the young woman on TikTok expressed disbelief and frustration. That pathos-filled lament from "gracieflynn12" had 2.9 million views as of Friday afternoon.
"I literally just like, I just can't even, I'm in shock right now," she said.
The young woman then explained that she and her classmates had also lost high school graduations to the COVID-19 pandemic, "which we thought was like a one-time thing," and that they were simply "unlucky."
So she thought it was a matter of bad fortune. Apparently, her USC education did not include modern history courses on gain-of-function research or mail-in ballots.
In any case, viewers watched as the young woman's other illusions about the world evaporated in real time.
"We've all worked so hard to get here. USC, I'm sure you know, is not an easy school to get into. And so everyone that goes here is very accomplished, like, had worked very hard to get in, and now they just canceled our freaking graduation," she said.
There you have the modern undergraduate. Trophy cases full of affirmation undoubtedly convinced her to refer to herself and her peers as "accomplished."
In any event, her tendency to overstate her own and her peers' records of achievement should not obscure the fact that, on some level, she expected the world to reward merit.
And she deserves credit for that. After all, not even a modern university education could stamp out that most basic human yearning for actual justice.
"Like, what now? What -- like, what now?" she asked, shrugging her shoulders. "They sent out an email 10 minutes ago about how they know it's disappointing but they're canceling it and they're gonna have other fun events, which, I don't even know what that means."
The matter-of-fact tone in her voice sounded more numb than outraged.
The young woman then acknowledged the situation with anti-Israel protests on campus. Without saying it in so many words, however, she also acknowledged administrators' cowardice and stupidity.
"I just feel like there could have been a different way to go about this than to cancel the entire graduation for a class that never even got a high school graduation either," she said.
WARNING: The following video contains crude language that some viewers may find offensive.
