Friday evening, when hundreds of seniors were celebrating graduating from high school with their friends and families, it was still a funny little thing that I wore a press pass to get into these events.

By Sunday morning, I think we were in a different world.

Two days earlier, one of the crowd-wranglers helping with graduation kind of giggled at me when she saw my press pass.

I’d been setting up to get some photos of the seniors walking into the ceremony, when she smiled and asked me if I had a senior graduating.

I told her no, I was from the Valley Record and showed her the ever-present badge around my neck at these sorts of events.

She thought, I am almost certain, that it was cute, even novel. What she said was, “Really, a press pass?”

It was a rhetorical question, and besides, the seniors had started marching in, so I never got a chance to respond. If I had, I would have said something about the pass being less for me and more for anyone wondering who I was and what I was doing. I hardly think about the silliness of it any more, just reflexively hang it around my neck before I go into any sort of crowd.

But maybe that’s why she thought it was funny. It’s graduation, right? People with cameras are everywhere, nothing unusual about that.

I never got the chance to ask. I hope that she would still consider it funny.

Since the horrible mass-shooting in Orlando Sunday morning, though, I expect that the definition of what’s unusual behavior for someone in a crowd is going to change.

It’s heart-breaking because of what happened, but also because of what is already happening as a result, the propagation of fear and distrust, the talk of expanding on the list of what makes people suspect, the search for an organization to blame.

Contrasted with the graduation celebrations of Friday, it’s even more tragic. A generation has just been sent out into a world that is more harsh and judgmental than it was when they started classes last fall. The world has changed since they started classes just last week.

They are a sturdy bunch, though. I think they’ll make their way as best they can. And I will continue to wear my little badge wherever I go.