Imagine for a moment that the future is going to be even more stressful than the present. Maybe we don’t need to imagine this. You probably believe it…
Suppose, too, that you are brave or crazy enough to have brought a child into this world, or rather this mess. If ever there were a moment for fortifying the psyche and girding the soul, surely this is it. But how do you prepare a child for life in an uncertain time — one far more psychologically taxing than the late-20th-century world into which you were born?
— from ‘What Happened to American Childhood?’ by Kate Julian, in The Atlantic, May 2020.
Like Ms. Julian, I was born into the late-20th-century world, before everything became more stressful. But unlike Ms. Julian, I’m not totally convinced that the future is going to be more stressful than the present.
I mean, the COVID pandemic is over. Isn’t it? Most of us are vaccinated — and boosted — and even those who weren’t vaccinated are still alive. Most of them anyway.
Can Ms. Julian imagine a future more stressful than 2020 and 2021? I truly wonder.
As far as the kids are concerned, they got to stay home from school for a whole year! When I was a kid, I would have given my right arm to stay home from school for a whole year. Well, maybe not my right arm… but certainly my entire baseball card collection.
And it’s not like childhood in the late-20th-century was a piece of cake. I distinctly remember the gift my parents had wrapped up for me on my tenth birthday. We’d already had an early November snowfall, and I could tell, even before I unwrapped it, that it was a snow shovel.
“You’re ten years old now, Louis,” they told me. “It’s going to be your job to keep the driveway shoveled.” Talk about stressful. Already, at age ten, I was looking forward to leaving for college.
But thanks to global warming, little boys, turning ten, no longer have an expectation of shoveling the driveway for the next eight years.
Which is to say, things are not worse. They are actually getting better.
Okay, some of you are laughing at that statement. Go ahead and laugh. But I have proof.
I should first make one thing clear. I was born in 1964, which — according to Wikipedia — was the last year you could be born and still be considered a Baby Boomer. My sister, who was born a year later, is officially classified (by the people doing the classifying) as a member of Generation X. Which explains, I suppose, why my sister and I could never get along. Different generations.
As the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, we Baby Boomers were raised, for a young age, to exude an optimistic outlook, even though we only had black-and-white TV.
And only three TV networks.
It was not necessarily an easy task to appear optimistic, when we knew that Soviet Russia had 26,100 nuclear warheads stockpiled, and the U.S. had 24,500. This fact did not bode well for the continued existence of humankind.
Our own children and grandchildren live in a very different world, as writer Kate Julian suggested. But it’s not a stressful world. It’s a wonderful world.
The kids nowadays can watch TV — in living color! — on their iPhones, with noise-cancelling AirPods stuck in their ears, while sitting at the back of the lecture hall. (The noise being canceled is the university professor droning on and on about how horrible the world has become.) These young people have a practically unlimited choice of TV programs and movies available.
Plus, with any luck, their student loans will be forgiven. If President Biden has his way.
Really, folks… does this student look stressed?
And while we’re on the subject, the estimated global number of nuclear warheads when my kids were born: 64,500.
Current global stockpile of nuclear warheads: 9,400. Hardly enough to get excited about.
But it gets even better. It now looks like Thursday is going to be the new Friday.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.