Crimson Whitewash
This story is sorta from last week, but nobody’s really bothered to cover it, so you may have missed it.
On April 2, Harvard Yearbook Publications posted to Instagram:
Class of 2025, your Harvard Yearbook is here! Come pick up your yearbook and relive the unforgettable moments from your time at Harvard!
The pick-up dates and times came in a later post.
Now, if I remember correctly, I think I was pretty excited to get my yearbook at Penn State, admittedly, of course, for the primary purpose of scouring the 570-page tome for pictures of —or references to— yours truly.
(There were a few, mostly in the fraternity portion.)
I can assure you that I didn’t bother looking at any of the pages that had anything to do with academics.
I also don’t recall looking at the Retrospect section before this morning. That chapter was subtitled “A Year in Review.”
It covered events such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, the felling of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism in Poland, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Hurricane Hugo, and Pete Rose being banned from baseball.
All of those things took place during or near what was my senior year.
Of course, there was a lot that happened around the world during my earlier days at Dear Old State, but the yearbook stuck to just that one year, which took up all of 14 pages.
Harvard’s 2025 yearbook, on the other hand, was designed as a comprehensive chronicle of the entire undergraduate experience, covering major events that occurred every month of the students' four years, from freshman orientation until the yearbook went to press.
So, as seniors leafed through the months and years, beginning in August 2021, when they turned the page to October 2023, they might reasonably have expected to see at least some passing mention of Hamas’ heinous attack against Israel, which took the lives of 1,200 innocent civilians, including 45 Americans.
Instead, all they got was “War Breaks Out in Gaza.”
Huh? How did the war “break out?”