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Graduation 2020: The Covid Class

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The 2020 graduating class faces challenges unlike any class before it. Uncertainty looms at every turn: job prospects, social interactions, and many other aspects of “normal life” once taken for granted. So what lessons can be learned from this unparalleled situation? Dennis Prager offers three.

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Script:

We are living in a unique time. You are therefore a unique graduating class. You may well be known forever as “the Covid Class.”

For the first time in history, billions of people, including healthy people and people living in free societies, have been confined to their homes. So let me offer you three lessons about life based on what you’ve experienced.

Number one: Life is hard. It’s unfair. It’s unpredictable.

Until now, most young people, at least in the West, did not appreciate how true this is. You’ve been living in a time and place in which so many of life’s hardships have been overcome. You’ve probably lived a healthier, safer, and freer existence than almost any young people who ever lived before you.

And if that is true, you would only know about how hard life is if you’ve read about the sufferings of others, such as the awful suffering people endured during World Wars I and II, not to mention the starvation and disease of the medieval and ancient worlds.

Because of the hardships caused by the coronavirus—including the shattering of millions of people’s livelihoods and dreams throughout the world—you’ve come to sense how hard life is. And that understanding equips you to deal much better with life’s challenges—which are inevitable.

Number two: Always be grateful.

Gratitude is probably the most important trait you can have—because it is the source of both happiness and goodness. In other words, you cannot be either a happy person or a good person unless you are a grateful person.

Unfortunately, most people don’t learn how important gratitude is until it’s too late. I’ll bet this makes a lot more sense to you now, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. How often have you thought of the good old days when you could go to a restaurant with friends, or to a sporting event or concert, or visit a relative you love? But were you grateful for those things when you were able to do them? Probably not.

So now, make this promise to yourself: I will not wait until I lose the good things in my life to be grateful for having them. Or, to put it another way, adopt an attitude that has guided me all of my life: If nothing’s horrific, life is terrific.

Most people wait for something wonderful to happen to be happy. My view has always been that instead of waiting for something great to happen to be happy, I will be happy until something awful happens.

Number three: Freedom is fragile. Very fragile.

The ease with which most Americans acquiesced to the removal of many of their most basic rights—even if you agree with that removal—should take your breath away. At the very least, it should make you realize how easily any government can take away people’s most elementary freedoms. This happened around the world, but I single out America because no country has been so free for so long. America, more than any country, has symbolized liberty. That’s why France gave America—and no other country—the Statue of Liberty.

Yet people living in states with fewer deaths from the coronavirus than from car accidents acquiesced to living under house arrest except to get food or medicine, being barred from walking outside with more than one other person, and being barred from walking their dog without wearing a face mask. Remarkably, they acquiesced to all this as they watched their life savings, their family business, or their job disappear.

For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/video/graduation-2020-the-covid-class

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32 Comments

  1. Huh. Do you think if we were celebrating our freedoms during Covid 19? Do you think it would've been different? It's reasonable to say that the deaths would've have been higher. As an Essential worker during the pandemic, I got Covid 19 in 3 different strands. The first one destroyed my immune system, putting me out of work for 2 weeks. I endangered my mother, my grandmother and my extended family whenever I got Covid 19. The quarantine was required, because it was bad during the quarantine anyway. Freedoms, to avoid death from a disease, should be taken away, if it's required for the safety of the people. China got rid of Covid 19 really quickly, because they had no freedoms to begin with. Even with their population being mostly 65 or older, they had some of the smallest amount of cases per capita. See, I don't think we should be like China, but I'm also saying we shouldn't be acting like our freedoms are being taken away when it's important to save lives

  3. Are they glorifying the pandemic? There are important lessons to draw from the pandemic, but holy shit a lot of deaths and hardships were entirely avoidable if the western world had taken the threat seriously, and taken the correct precautions..

  8. Watching this one year of 15 days to slow the spread anniversary. Still have Stay at home orders in some states. Every state has a mask mandate. So see what happens when you give up the tiniest bit of Freedom.

  13. Life shouldn’t be this hard. Life shouldn’t be this unfair. Life should have more freedom than ever before. We are not anywhere close to where we should be. This is the fault of the bad behavior of the Chinese Government and the Government of the United States

  14. The statue of liberty wasnt given to America by the French it was actually made for Egypt but they couldn't afford it. The statue was already made and the U.S recieved it by default because we could afford the labor cost to construct it. You're making stuff up. Hahahaha

  22. 2:47 “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. There privileges, that’s all we ever had in this country is a Bill of Temporary Privileges and if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter.” -George Carlin

  30. How is PragerU both against a police state but pro more police funding and police… I don't understand. Are you FOR or AGAINST the government? Or are you just for things that personally benefit you?