What a Legacy

When my son becomes 21, in ten years, what will the world be like? I will be 65 years old. Compare my world at the age of 21 to HIS age of 21.

Hell, let's go even further back. My father's world at 21. My father's world at age 21 was 1943. 1943 was probably overall, and I can say with confidence in regards to the future, the worst year that Humanity has ever seen or ever will see. The litany of horrors that sprinkle the year 1943 is so unspeakable that it is completely inconceivable to those of us living today under the age of 60. 1943 was the height, the sickening apogee of World War II; living in that world, during that year, for every single human being on Earth must have been a nightmare of such indescribable proportions that I can not envision any kind of scenario in which anything even close could ever happen to humanity as a species again.

A natural disaster? Perhaps. An asteroid strike or Yellowstone erupting . . . these would be horrific events. But a man-made disaster equal to World War II? It will, can, never happen again.

But that's the world my father looked upon at age 21; indeed, he was already a part of the disaster, right in the middle of it, at the very epicenter of the worldwide conflagration. Hell, he was one of the ones that contributed a HUGE part to the conflagration: flying in B-24 bombers over Germany and France and bombing the shit out of the Germans. Can you imagine the sheer horror of it to a 21-year-old mind?

As I wrote in a recent email to my sister, the penalties to my father, had he ever been unfortunate enough to be captured behind German lines, would have been horrendous. Everyone thinks that Allied airmen were just shuffled into prison camps with people like Steve McQueen digging tunnels and such tripe. It was far more likely to be beaten to death by an enraged populace (this was actively encouraged by the Nazis) or be put in an extermination camp.

This was the reality my father would have looked upon every time he volunteered to climb into a B-24 (the aircrews were all-volunteer), which ended up being 25 times.

At 21 I was in art school, a very different reality. There was no worldwide conflict. Sure, there was the Cold War, but that brought more yawns than fear to most of the world.

Still, there were no computers. I didn't even have a VCR. There were about twelve channels on the TV. Cable television was just getting started, but I couldn't afford it. There was no Internet, no one had cell phones. If you wanted to look up some arcane piece of information you either didn't bother or you had to go to a public library. Music came on vinyl albums and would continue to do so until I was about 26 years old. Getting drunk at home or a bar was my most popular form of recreation. There was simply nothing else to do. There were no ATM machines. You had to get money while the bank was open, at your branch. I had no camera and there were very, very few moving pictures of me under the age of 21.

What will my son's reality be in ten years? He will never have lived in a pre-digital world. He will have used a computer from the age of three. His childhood will have been immortalized on several DVDs. He will carry some kind of mobile device. Frankly, I have no clue what the world is going to look like in ten years. Just ten years ago the world was a completely different place. There was no YouTube, no Wikipedia, hardly anyone had a cell phone and one used them to make phone calls, not take photographs or listen to music. Oh, yeah, mp3s had just come into being and pirating music was becoming popular.

Today if I want to listen to a pice of music -- almost any music ever produced electronically -- all I have to do is go to YouTube. Any obscure fact you can think of is probably exhaustively covered on Wikipedia. You can find out many things about someone you met yesterday by plugging their name into a search engine.

It still takes 11 hours to fly from California to Japan but in ten years, will that still be the case?

Will certain diseases be eradicated by gene therapy, will Islamists rule the Middle East with iron fists, or will democracy have invaded every corner of the earth? Will China be the dominant super power, will Iran still be waving its nuclear matchsticks around in envy-wracked tantrums?

Almost certainly I will still be alive.

I think all in all, I'd rather this present state of affairs just froze in its tracks for the rest of my life. Being alive today is like walking around in old slippers.