Thanksgiving, a day late
On a Wednesday afternoon in 1924, President Coolidge's two sons-John, 17, and Calvin, 16-played a game of tennis on the south lawn of the White House. Wearing shoes without socks was something of a fashion among teenage boys of the era, a fashion trend that has come and gone repeatedly in the decades since, probably because it dovetails neatly
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It's hard for me to compare since I've never been a student with the internet, but I think the biggest changes are:
a) we spent more time doing our research in the library than on the web;
b) social connections required more effort to maintain.
While I was an undergraduate, I got into a relationship and moved across the bay from Berkeley to San Francisco, which put a dent in my social life that would have been less severe, I think, if we had Facebook, or even e-mail lists to organize events. I got pretty disconnected from campus after the move. I can't say I regret it-the relationship is still going, 23 years later-but I think I would have benefited from social networking and the like, especially since my social skills were pretty poor when I was college-aged.
The ability to get a reasonably reliable answer to any factual question within a few seconds is something I really, really could have used in my college years.
When it comes to being destructive, we're so much less destructive than we used to be, which seems remarkable considering the toll of the Nazis and the Communists over the last 100 years. Steven Pinker is coming out with a book soon which details how dramatically violence has declined as a cause of death among humans, and which tries to offer some insight into why that might be.
And when it comes to destruction of the planet, I'm optimistic. I think many of the problems people identify as destructive to the planet are things which are self-correcting or are things we can manage with increasing wealth. I don't think we can close our eyes, ignore the environment, and have everything turn out okay, but I also don't think the problems are insurmountable, and I think many of them will prove to be much easier to fix than they now appear.
While I'm too young to have grown up in the duck-and-cover era, I'm old enough that I remember when the threat of large-scale nuclear war appeared very real (probably because it was very real). The risk of a global catastrophe like that hasn't been eliminated, but it's been reduced, and the nuclear threat is-at least for now-mostly one of small-scale nuclear threats, like terrorists setting off a bomb in a major city, or a rogue state nuking an enemy. It's strange to call something that could kill several million people a "small-scale" threat, but I lived through the era when we worried about a massive war between the US and USSR in which only the cockroaches might survive.
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I also heard stories about going to college in the 1970s and how they had to wait in line for hours to sign up for classes, work because there were no such thing as loans or financial aid, spend hours at the library studying and using typewriters and fixing mistakes. Too much work. My Mom said she didn't watch TV while in college, and couldn't believe how much free time I had in college.
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My parents had enough money to pay for college outright, so I escaped without work or debt. A lot of my friends did work-study and student loans, so in that sense, it wasn't any different than it is today.
I had a TV in college, although our dorms didn't have cable. When I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, we got cable and rented movies on video cassettes.
I wrote my high school papers on a typewriter, and yes, I've used a lot of white-out. By college, I had a computer and a printer, so I composed my papers on a piece of DOS software called Wordstar, the death of which was lamented by no one. Most of my friends used typewriters, though.
In the dorms, the one guy on my floor who owned a computer was immediately nicknamed "Computer Mike." Later in the year, a second kid on the floor got an $8,000 NeXT computer bought by a rich uncle.
I probably had to spend more time in the library than your generation does, although I think my level of free time was much closer to yours than to your mom's.
My mom didn't go to college, except for a brief stint in junior college in Vallejo. My dad got through college on a football scholarship, and then he used his GI Bill eligibility from having served in the Air Force during the Korean War to pay for graduate school while he was working as a high school PE teacher and football coach.
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I discovered in college that I'd go nuts without high speed internet and cable TV.
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I didn't watch TV much (at all?) when I was living in the dorms, but when I moved in with my partner, we usually watched something each night, either a show taped on the VCR or a rented movie.
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My parents are in their mid 50s, so what you say they lived only magnified. They were both old enough to understand the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis but too young to fully grasp it. My Dad talks about being afraid the world could end at any moment for a week or two.
I was born around nine months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
But as a child of the 1970s, the threat of nuclear war was all too real to me. I grew up within five miles of the largest U.S. military storage facility in Europe. That was where supplies were kept to support NATO troops defending western Europe against a Soviet land invasion from the east. Its coordinates were undoubtedly programmed into half a dozen Soviet nuclear missiles arrmed with hydrogen bombs.
The town's police station still had a World War 2 air-raid siren on the roof. My father was one of the local policemen and he explained that it was now the warning siren for a nuclear attack.
He took me inside the police station one day and showed me a large grey metal box with lights on the front. It was emitting clicks, once a second. That, he said, is our link to the government's central early warning system for nuclear attacks. As long as it's clicking, we're okay -- no attack has been detected. If it stops clicking, he told me, we all have about four minutes to live.
I was around ten years old at the time. The memory still sends a shiver down my spine.
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My connection to the nuclear threat wasn't as direct as that. I remember meeting a science fiction author who had studied the US extensively and concluded that the safest place in the continental US to survive a nuclear attack was Ashland, Oregon, so he moved there. At the time it seemed strange to me someone would make a major life decision like where to live based on that.
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