We are parents of a member of the Class of 2020. The virus should have been named Covid-20 in your honor! You’ve no doubt heard us older adults say that we’ve never seen anything like this pandemic before. That fact makes you, the Class of 2020, extremely special.
In these last two months, as young twenty-somethings, you’ve experienced profound disappointment, loss, upheaval, confusion, sadness —and you’ve had to be resilient, flexible, independent and optimistic. You’ve figured out how to carry on when your world took a dramatic nose-dive, you bonded with friends over the seismic shift in your circumstances, you’ve accessed your reserves of empathy, knowing so many others have it far worse than you, and you’ve witnessed the power of pulling together. You have been fast-tracked into adulthood in ways you certainly wouldn’t have chosen, and we never would have chosen for you, but there it is.
Please know that you have gained something valuable from this unsettling experience. It has marked you, the Class of 2020, as no other.
Be proud of yourselves, of all you have learned, accomplished and endured. Treasure your Georgetown friends who have weathered this with you. You will one day look back on this and appreciate that you, the pandemic Class of 2020, are really something special.
-Diane and Tom Moriarty