Everett G. Andersen
When my parents were in their teens, the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression, and then World War II. The vision they had of their future was just to survive. They had been through what would could be considered the most transitional period in our country's history. As teens, they could have never envisioned going from the Great Depression to living a middle-class life.
When I was growing up, there was the constant threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I may have been of the MTV generation, but I was also the generation of The Day After, Red Dawn, The Terminator, and Radioactive Dreams. The arms race was going at a fevered pitch when I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was talking tough to the Soviets, the Soviets were going through premiers like they were popcorn—Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko—and things finally settled down with Gorbachev. I still remember sitting in the cafeteria of Madison East High School (GO PURGOLDERS!) and talking with my friends, wondering if the next Soviet leader would blow the world to kingdom come. When I joined the Army in 1985 and was stationed on the East/West German border, the idea of war between the super powers became a very real possibility to me. Had war broken out, my life expectancy was measured in minutes instead of years.
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Today, hanging on my walls are awards I received while in the Army, reminders from life I lived a long time ago—that I served on the U.S.-U.S.S.R. border, and that I defended the nation from Communist aggression. My childhood fears turned out to unfounded, the Cold War ended, we never really got the peace dividend we were supposed to get, but the world did not end in flames. Today, I am the father of a teenager who has a 3.5 GPA, is a musician, a two-sport athlete, and is more politically aware than most adults.
What follows are his words, words that were prompted by a simple statement he made to me on the way home from school one day. That he was worried the world we know today will not exist when he becomes an adult, that it would be some kind of dystopian nightmare.
My future — Everett G. Andersen
Today, when I look at the world I see things that make me want to change it for the better. I see things that disgust me and things that make me proud to be a part of my generation. Yet I wonder if we have the potential to be the humans of the future as portrayed in Star Trek or if we have more in common with a hungry lion stalking its prey. I fear for my future because there are too many people running the country that should not have even been elected as dog catcher.
I fear that one day there may be people who cannot go to school because they cannot afford it because everything is privatized. I fear that we will revert back to the ways of the late 1800s and early 1900s, where there are little to no regulations on business. A time where children will work and unions won’t exist. I fear that the country is going to go to crap before I get to do anything about it.
While researching Ronald Reagan for a paper in my English class about why the right idolizes him so much, I found absolutely zero reasoning behind their worship of him. He was a mediocre president at best and his idea of Reaganomics failed horribly. The reason his economic plan has failed us is due to the greed of those in the top 1 percent. He sent our nation down a spiraling path that seems impossible to stop. I imagine my future will be a place where things like Social Security, Medicare, and free public schooling won’t exist. The worst part is that I will more than likely be forced into years of debt in order to be able to attend college.
My future seems as bleak as what was portrayed in Soylent Green or Mad Max. One where climate change has been ignored for far too long because people believed it was a myth. I see a future where schools do not teach science topics like evolution. In high school history we are currently learning about the 1920s, and the Scopes Trial, in which John T. Scopes taught evolution to some children in Tennessee and was charged for violating the Tennessee Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. Blinded by the guidance of a book, the Bible, written thousands of years ago. Today we see the very same thing where some states want to make it illegal to teach evolution, or at the very least, give equal time to creationism.
Unfortunately, there are times when my future seems bleak, and it seems as though I will be unable do anything about it as well. Whenever I think about it, I am disgusted because the right knows what they are doing. They know that they are throwing my generation's future under the bus. They know that they can fix it, too. The problem is that they don’t want to. They only care about the rich so that they may become rich. It truly is a dog-eat-dog world, and if you aren’t a predator like a lion, you are the prey. There is no way around it, and that is unfortunate, as that is not what I want for my generation's future.