The Final Weeks of High School

Admittedly I spent my final days of high school skipping classes and hanging out with my friends at a beach so remote the Vice-Principal would have had to be in a boat on the water to find us.

The final days of this election cycle is populated with perhaps the archetypes of high school seniors in the final days of school.

Bush: 

Bad case of senioritis.  No friends to hang out at the beach with.  Most likely to attempt some huge destructive prank before graduation.

Palin:  

The kid who pulls the fire alarm and calls in the bomb scares just to be disruptive. (Note: when I was in high school bomb scares were: a. more frequent than fire drills, b. taken less seriously than fire drills, and c. unlikely to be covered by our local paper much less become a media event.

McCain:  

Palin's creepy anti-social boyfriend who she is openly cheating on.  He is the angry, dispirited kid who just wants everything to be over.  This kid was never a good student, not an athlete, never found a social niche, and lives with the scars of some long-ago childhood abuse. He shows up at school most days but may as well be invisible.

Obama:  

He reminds me of a specific person rather than a 'type'.  Our yearbook editor was a girl named Sandy.  Sandy was a tad under 5 feet tall and renowned for the number of books she could carry home to study.  And not 'study' as in 'do the assigned homework' but 'study' in the sense of do more work than required and learn more about the topic than possibly the teacher.  Even with the yearbook safely at the printer, the college deposit sent in, and her position as class valedictorian assured, Sandy was still writing papers, still studying for tests and still showing up for class (or so I heard from the beach) prepared and ready to discuss the topic of the day.

Obama must remain like Sandy.  No letting up until the diploma is safely in hand, belongings are moved into the college dorm room and class registration is complete.  Then maybe a coffee break of an hour or two, but surely no partying away the first semester. The same level of commitment shown in high school must be evident on Day One of college.