We all have heard people say they never look back, only forward and perhaps this is true, but I have always suspected such declarations disingenuous. To quote William Shakespeare; “What’s past is prologue.”
All of us have experienced negative or even traumatic events from our childhood, adolescence, high school and throughout adulthood. We are as much a product of the negative events of our life as the positive ones. It is in those life experiences that we grew, matured, and developed a thicker skin for what was to come later in life.
This of course is subjective as with age, your aperture continues to widen and the things you never gave a second thought to force themselves into your mind’s eye and force you to question and re-evaluate. In the seventh decade of life, I find myself reflecting on people and events from the past. Collectively, they represent a montage of a world that was far less complicated and a simpler time.
Unquestionably, life was simpler for us than it is for our children and grandchildren. We were inoculated against so many things for the simple reason we were not exposed to them. Simply put, we did not know what we did not know. If you wanted to get in the weeds about the world around you, you had to make the effort. The nightly news and daily newspaper were easy for young people to ignore or disregard. We came home from school to stay-at-home moms and there was a sense of security that came from a simpler time where divorce was far rarer and the nuclear family much stronger and more cohesive. There was no internet to stealthily enter homes; a trojan horse compromising the control that parents have over their young children.
I am sure that the idea of a disgruntled classmate coming to school with a gun never for a second entered the minds of any of my classmates. We had a rifle club that competed competitively with other high schools. And yet I never gave the issue of firearms a second thought. We had drivers’ education and our parents taught us how to drive. The lessons I learned from my dad were always to stay one car length behind the car in front of you for every ten miles per hour that you are driving; always check your blind spot and always drive defensively. These lessons have served me well.
Our generation was born after World War II, we came to military age just as the Vietnam war was ending and we were too old for Iraq and Afghanistan. College was affordable and when we graduated, there were well paying jobs for anyone who wanted to work. When I graduated from college, the average price of a home was $50,000 and $10,000 a year was a good salary. My generation grew up in the sweet spot of the 20th century.
The opportunities that my generation were afforded are slowly being unattainable to younger generations. Every parent wants their children to have a better life than they had. Affording college, owning a home, having both the monetary and support system to have their own children is infinitely harder for young people than it was for us.
Young or old, today, we are all navigating the same stormy seas. We are not navigating these waters in the same boat, but we are navigating the same seas, nonetheless. Humanity is facing an uncertain future, with minefields of varying size and potential destruction littered in front of us.
This morning I read an article in the New York Times summarizing an annual survey by the World Economic Forum. According to the report published Wednesday, two-thirds of respondents expect an “elevated chance of global catastrophes” in the next decade. About 30% expect the same in the next two years. The report, which comes ahead of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next week, is based on responses from 1,490 risk experts primarily from business, but also academia, government, and civil society.
I liken where we are as a planet to the little Dutch boy who furiously kept trying to plug all the leaks in the dam only to eventually realize that there were more holes than he had fingers. The fear is that the dam is about to burst, and your social class, educational level and net worth are not going to save you.
Whether such events happen is debatable. But there is a general feeling among many that this might be the calm before the storm. How the future plays out, we must learn to get along and compromise. In most conflicts, whether it is between individuals or between nations, the truth always lies in the middle.
