High school graduation season is upon us, the time of year when communities across America celebrate the accomplishments of young people receiving their high school diplomas.

Graduation is a bittersweet occasion, marking both an ending and a beginning. For the grads, they will realize that the past four years, which they began as adolescents, are now culminating as they step into adulthood. They will be saying goodbye to their friends, teachers, and mentors who guided them through their formative high school years.

For every parent, watching a son or daughter stride across the stage as their name is called to receive their diploma will bring a flood of emotions, pride, and nostalgia. The sentiments expressed in the song, Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof, often come to mind:

Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?
When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he grow to be so tall?
Wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?

Even those without a direct connection to a graduate will smile at the sight of brightly-colored balloons and other festive decorations marking graduation parties in our neighborhoods. We will recall our own high school graduations and think about the happiness and expectations that filled our hearts and minds at that stage of our lives.

Today’s graduates will be tomorrow’s leaders who soon will be shaping our future. We will be counting upon them to make the world a better place. Let’s hope that we have supplied them with the tools they need to ensure that they can meet the challenges we are facing today and in the years ahead, both for the sake of their own generation and of those before and after.

We offer our heartfelt congratulations to the graduates and their families, wishing them sunshine and blue skies not only on their Graduation Day, but in the years ahead.

Deja vu all over again with Iran

For those of us who were around during the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran from late 1979 to early 1981, the present situation involving the closing of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranian government is deja vu all over again.

Both crises illustrate the two strengths of the Iranian regime: They excel at taking hostages and they know how to play the long game. In 1979, the Iranians seized and held 54 members of the U.S. Embassy, while today they are blocking the passage through the strait of hundreds of ships, wreaking havoc on the world economy.

Just as the administration of then-President Jimmy Carter made a series of miscalculations that underestimated the fanatical Iranian government, so too has the present U.S. administration failed to realize that the Iranians play by their own rules and on their own timetable.

The hostage crisis that undermined the Carter presidency lasted for 444 days, with the Iranians releasing the hostages only upon the swearing-in of President Ronald Reagan after Carter signed the Algiers Accords (which made a number of concessions to Iran) on his last day in office. The Iranians had simply wanted to humiliate Jimmy Carter up until the last day of his presidency.

The current conflict with Iran now is approaching 100 days with no end in sight. The disruption to the world economy and the rising rate of inflation in our country caused by the closing of the strait have served to underscore that this so-called war — which has not accomplished any of its supposed objectives (regime change? eliminating Iran’s nuclear bomb capabilities? destroying Iran’s missile and drone weapons? convincing Iran to support its proxies?) — was a fool’s mission undertaken by those who failed to learn the lessons of 45 years ago.

As the oft-quoted philosopher George Santayana put it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”