Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 15, 2025
Graduation season invites countless bittersweet reflections among parents who struggle to reconcile the underlying truth of "long nights, short years" with their nostalgia for their children as little ones. But it's also a time for the rest of society to grapple with a growing problem in American culture -- not of a bad thing happening, but of a good thing that's falling too often by the wayside. ■ For all of its merits as a way to celebrate and encourage success, graduation isn't an acceptance ritual. And it's becoming clear that we need to revive interest in acceptance rituals for our own good. ■ Much has been said and written about the problem of perpetual adolescence and other forms of arrested development. Anyone who has seen or engaged in a lament about "adulting" is aware of the problem. ■ Religion has historically offered defined rituals marking a passage from childhood to adulthood, in forms like confirmation and the bat and bar mitzvah. But it is well-known that religious attendance is in marked decline. ■ Likewise, clubs and organizations with a defined focus on character development have often had ceremonies to mark a ritualized acceptance into a more senior stage of participation -- like the crossover ceremony long employed in Scouting. But these organizations, too, have struggled. ■ Significantly, there isn't any parallel "crossover" experience in activities like youth sports. One day, you're on a U12 team, and then you move on to a U13. The same goes for the Internet -- there is no adult Internet to "join". It's just there, with a flattened experience for everybody. ■ Rituals accepting young people into new gradations of adulthood -- long before high school or college graduation -- not only help to welcome youth into adult or near-adult communities (an important process in its own right), but they also help to signify that with acceptance comes the imposition of expectations. ■ Duties matter, and if we don't yoke them to certain unavoidable features like age, then some people would shirk them forever. There is very good reason to believe we're living with the consequences of exactly that problem among all too many people today.
