October 7th, 1995, the younger of my two sons was born. Today, he turns 18. He's crossed that perhaps-artificial line between being a boy and being a man, I've crossed that perhaps-artificial line between being legally responsible for my children and being only morally and emotionally responsible for them, and in between bouts of feeling very, very old, I am looking back at the last eighteen years of his life. I'm thinking about the state of the world then, and now.
When he was born, the biggest news of the day was the acquittal of OJ Simpson for two murders. Today? It's the looming destruction of the American economy. And to think about everything we've seen in the intervening years....
I'm realizing... Christ, what the hell kind of world have we been creating for him?
If you're interested in the perhaps excessive logorrhea of one dad having an existential crisis, hop over the orange pouf.
When my son (who I'll herein refer to as "J") was born, Bill Clinton was President, and was just gearing up his reelection campaign. We were enjoying a thriving economy, relative domestic peace, and a generally optimistic future. Yes, the dot-com bubble was swelling, and in an odd parallel with today, a budget showdown which would lead to a government shutdown in forty-one days was in the works. Of course, back then, the economy was strong and the temporary shutdown was something our economy could tolerate far more than the far more fragile economy we have today.
But I was not greatly concerned about the world we were building for J and his older brother B (who was 2 1/2 at the time). Things seemed to be headed, largely, in the right direction.
Of course, in 2000 things started to change. The people voted to elect Al Gore for President, but Florida's government and the SCOTUS had other plans, and George W. Bush won the election. Less than eight months after he took office, the world changed because 20 evil assholes flew some planes into some buildings and killed thousands of people.
Less than a month after that -- on this very day in 2001, when J turned six -- we were at war. "Operation Enduring Freedom" they called it, in what has been proven to be a far more Orwellian moniker than we knew even at the time.
We've been at war ever since. For exactly two-thirds of J's life, this nation has been at war. He can scarcely remember a time when we haven't been at war. And of course, this war expanded, on March 20, 2003, to a new country, one which wasn't even connected to the attacks which precipitated the first one.
This war footing has profoundly changed our culture. J and B have never really known a time when we could meet our loved ones at the gate of the airport, or where we could board an aircraft without an intrusive search of our belongings and persons. They've never really known a time when our politics weren't focused on "supporting the troops". They have never really known a time when friends and family weren't deployed across the world to fight battles that didn't seem to have any achievable objectives. And they have come to learn that both their family and their friends would lose their lives as a consequence of war. How do these young men, and every other young man and woman growing up while their country is on a war footing, look at the world in ways that we who grew up during peacetime do not?
The economy took a huge hit thanks to the housing bubble and associated Wall Street shenanigans, and has yet to truly recover. Unlike when I was their age, the young men and women looking at college today are realizing that their post-graduate prospects are mediocre at best, and that the cost of a college education may not be worth the potential increase in earning potential. When I went to college, it was to gain knowledge for knowledge's sake; I wanted to pursue my interests and learn more of the world, not train for a career. But the cost of education vs. the prospects for employment have forced the latest generation to look in stark economic, perhaps even cynical, terms at the dollar value of an education.
And beyond economy, beyond war -- or who knows, perhaps related to it -- is what's happened since Barack Obama won the White House in 2008. Our politics have devolved into a cynical circus of scorched-earth warfare and the drive to care about nothing other than victory. This has culminated in -- well, we've come full circle from eighteen years ago today, only with a far darker picture. Once again we have a Democratic President and a Republican-controlled House, with the House engaged in a very cynical, politically calculated game of brinksmanship to try to force the President to capitulate to their demands. But today, the government is shut down with no real signs of the impasse being overcome, a far more destructive gambit is being threatened over the debt ceiling, and the people who seem to be running the show in the House are not only apparently willing to shoot the proverbial hostage, but they seem more eager to do so than they are willing to compromise in any way. And our economy, already struggling due to this repeated and sustained intransigence from the Republicans in Congress preventing the promotion of policies that could help us all, is staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, with perhaps the world economy ready to be kneecapped along with it.
And this is the world into which J enters adulthood today. A nation that's been on a war footing for twelve of his eighteen years, with all the social, psychological and cultural implications of said sustained footing. A political system that's broken to the point where democracy itself is on the line. An economy which is far worse than the one into which he was born, where the entitled few reap rewards and the rest of us stagnate -- and where even that economy can have its legs cut out from under it because the Republican Party would rather sacrifice us all than allow the President a political victory.
We've failed him, and we've failed every other young man and woman who is coming of age right now. We can -- we MUST -- do better, and live up to our responsibility to the next generation. It is, well, it OUGHT to be, the first responsibility of our and every generation: to make the world better for the generation that follows.
Let us do better. Let us BE better.