From Class of '68 to '08, future still holds promise

Driving to a son's graduation last weekend, I stopped counting deer carcasses at 24. It's hard to look at a landscape littered with roadkill when one is about to launch a beloved child into the world.

Especially this world.

My new grad is 22, has a freshly minted diploma from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was turned loose Sunday after exhortations to remember that, from now on, he is "Forever a Badger."

The idea of Eternal Badgerhood hit his old man hard. I am a fan of tuition reciprocity, and sending a Minnesota kid to Cheddar Land is the best college bargain in the country. But I would have had second thoughts if I had foreseen the psychic stranglehold Bucky would get on my boy, or if I had anticipated how alien I would feel when one of the grads crossing the stage in the Kohl Center (just one of a weekend's worth of commencements in Badgerville) pretended that his name was Brett Favre.

The kid raised his hands in triumph, signaling a touchdown when the announcer - reading names at a clip of 30 per minute to get us through the hour of diploma handing - played along with the joke.

"Brett Favre," the announcer deadpanned, reading the slip of paper the kid gave him. Everyone laughed, which was good. We needed one. Nothing else about the occasion was funny.

People of my generation often are accused of living in the '60s, which is madness. No one who lived through the '60s would want to stay there.

The 1960s were not as fun as they are cracked up to be, especially by those who trace all problems back to that era. They weren't fun at all.

I graduated from high school in 1968, and started at the University of Minnesota at a time when war, assassination, political turmoil and social upheaval dominated the headlines and the heartaches. Anyone in their 50s - especially those of us listening to "Pomp and Circumstance" this spring - is having deja vu. Here we go again?

We hope not.

Barack Obama is promising change - or threatening it, depending on your point of view. But change is easy: We will get change, all right. There is no question about it. Things are tottering on the verge, one way or the other. The world may soon get far better, safer, healthier, happier. Or not.

It will not stay the same.

The students were very bright, very sincere and very naive. They had a "deer in the headlights" look, which ends badly, as I said at the start.

I couldn't help thinking they looked like the kids who cut their hair and went Clean for Gene, going door-to-door for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 New Hampshire primary that drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House. And ended up letting Richard Nixon in.

Few in the children's crusade of 1968 could see the troubles ahead. We can't, either. Will there be war in Iran? Economic collapse, ecological disaster, political repression?

Anything could happen.

My new grad is studying fish and marine life. With luck, for the planet, he may help prevent the seas from returning to a primordial state dominated by primitive life forms in a warming, acidic soup. As one of the speakers at his graduation predicted, "You will solve problems we don't even know that we have yet."

So forget 1968. It's ancient history. Yesterday is, too. When your kids are wearing caps and gowns, it's all about their future, which is in their hands, along with their diplomas and their hopes. If we can just get them to the threshold. As a parent, all we can ask is that our children get a fair shot.

At the end of commencement, 1,200 young people beginning their lives hugged, en masse, and swayed, singing the lovely hymn, "Varsity."

"Praise to thee, our Alma Mater. U-rah-rah! Wisconsin!"

Forever a Badger.

Up in the stands of Bucky's arena, 1,200 families cried. At least in Section 205 they did.

Sparks, smoke and shards of rubber went flying as I veered left, away from the truck, driving on the shoulder and trying to avoid colliding with the suddenly swaying semi.

Just an instant on a road. We made it past, and safely home. His graduation was over.

Everything else is up to him.