It was the usual noise on cable news. Everyone was talking about the golden age of America, the last time we were great.
A commentator in his eighties talked about the values developed when he was a child in the thirties and forties, gaining strength through sacrifice during the depression, and then standing up to dictators overseas. Everyone worked hard and respected their parents. This was the generation of my father, and yes, I got the stories of walking to school ten miles in the snow, of churning your own butter, of a myriad of chores, and not having things I have as a kid, like heat and electricity. But kids played and had fun, not aware of what they didn't have, enjoying what they had.
The next commentator, in his sixties, talked about how the golden age was actually when he was a kid, of biking and playing outside for hours without fear. If they had a television it was only one or two channels, and everyone had after-school jobs and didn't complain about how little they made.
Then the next commentator referred to the golden age when he was a kid in the seventies and eighties, about how he too worked more and had to do without things (no cell phones or Snapper Chat), and was raised in the glow of the Reagan presidency.
And on it went, each generation perceiving their generation as the golden age, and the next as going downhill, and being the decline of America.
Then it hit me. Everyone thinks the golden age was when they were twelve years old! Unless your childhood was completely foul, you remember the time before you paid attention to the national and world news, while your parents protected you and made you feel safe, that yours was the time America needed to get back to.
Well, it can't. Because nobody stays twelve forever. Because you can't live in a shifting mirage that is only a dream and can't be recaptured.
Ask Japanese Americans about being interred in camps in the forties.
Ask African-Americans about the struggle against discrimination in the fifties.
Ask Vietnam Vets and others about the horrors of the Vietnam War. Ask about living through the assassinations of our greatest leaders (John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X).
Ask those who were disillusioned by Watergate in the seventies, or women in their struggle for equality in pay and treatment.
Ask those who lost economic standing in the eighties due to failed trickle-down economics and the ever-increasing income gap, or the LGBT community fighting an AIDS crisis that the government barely recognized.
And on and on it goes.
There is no golden age. Only the golden hue you remember from your own childhood.
Sure, the kids nowadays have things you didn't have, and yes, they have to cope with a new social dynamic. But that doesn't make them better or worse than the previous generations. They actually have more to cope with. Declining economic opportunities, climate change and weather destabilization, growing pollution and population, an administration that is destroying any semblance of our civic decency, and increasing gun violence, just to name a few.
Nothing that has happened in recent years has encouraged me more than the young people that are starting to stand up for themselves and fight back. The students of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland are not satisfied to just be victims. They are fighting back with a fury and intelligence I have rarely seen, and sparking other students throughout the country.
Yeah, they got smartphones. Yeah, you may think they're spoiled and entitled, as every previous generation has thought about the next generation.
But me?
I think the kids are all right. And that golden age?
Maybe that will arrive someday.
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