One of the relatively few benefits gained by being 74 is that living over seven decades helps smooth out the hills and valleys of history. So many events and tragedies and victories and disappointments and promises that seemed so momentous at the time now seem much less dramatic and overwhelming.
Hindsight really is 20-20, but hindsight also provides real answers to the questions about "what's going to happen?" It is quite natural to imagine the very worst possibilities in the moment -- some would claim that the tendency to prepare for the worst is what has helped the human species survive. On the other hand, dogs don't imagine much about the future and the species seems to be doing OK...
As our memory of history stretches out, we also have a chance to see just how wrong our "in the moment" predictions" turned out to be.
An example of time "smoothing" history might be the Vietnam War. For me, it eventually led to being drafted and then enlisting in the Air Force and risking being sent to southeast Asia. I was sent to England instead, and that bit of luck led to a marriage now approaching 53 years and our first daughter... and then so much more. Fewer and fewer Americans are now living who remember the events of the 1960s and 1970s very clearly, and that includes those of us who lived through them. Most of my memories of the Air Force are vague or fleeting, despite those years being stressful and formative (I guess). Maybe I just assume those three years were formative since I can't draw any direct lines between what happened then and who I am now.
I was thinking the other day that my grandchildren couldn't even imagine being separated from family and childhood friends for two years, as Kathleen and I were from 1971-73 while we lived near RAF Lakenheath in the days before easy phone access and the internet. Considered as a fraction of a lifespan, two years really is not all that long. At 74, those two years amount to about 3 percent of my life at this point. And that percentage keeps getting smaller.
An example of a prediction that turned out much worse that I imagined was the advent of the internet, which I went on record as predicting would be the end of censorship. My reasoning was based on the old saying that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press." Therefore, when all of us could publish online, without needing to work for a newspaper's ownership, freedom would reign and we would enter a golden era of communication.
Then came social media and endless online platforms that can publish everything from valuable insights on the human condition to sheer garbage. The U.S. Justice Department this week charged a number of Russians with adding very effective lies and distortions to the news feeds of millions of people who are simply not equipped with the means of separating fact from fiction.
Many people don't even try, of course, and actually welcome the fantasy world of conspiracies and breathless rumors based on slivers of truth. After all, it's fun... not to mention many people clearly are living lives of quiet desperation and find reality more disturbing than any wacko conspiracy.
How else to explain most of the Trump cult?
Related to my inaccurate prediction of an internet golden era would be the affordability and accessibility of smart phones. I recall many educators proclaiming that schools could stop wasting space on computer labs and that we could leverage the reality that all human knowledge could be accessed from a device students carry in their pockets and purses and backpacks.
Social media basically took off in 2007, which already seems forever ago, and most people are in agreement that young people, in particular, have been seriously harmed by smartphones and their access to platforms that focus on creating addictions. I would argue that all age groups have been affected, but young people are more depressed, more pessimistic, more isolated, more unhappy. Even Gen Xers will proudly remember their youth as not being overwhelmed by devices and social media (though they are certainly addicted now).
The biggest trend in education right now is taking phones out of the hands of students, at least during school hours. Every educator who has experienced the relief of devices being removed from the classroom and hallways and lunchrooms reports more engaged kids, fewer disruptions, and more laughter and smiles around the school.
Deep thinkers are asking, "How could we have ever allowed those phones to invade our schools?" Here's how: we made uninformed predictions.
Two freshmen and two math teachers were slaughtered this week at a Georgia high school by a freshman boy given an AR-15 by his father. Both will be going to jail, if there is any justice. The Republican candidate for vice president said that school shooting are just "a fact of life."
Really? Aren't smart phones just a fact of life? But we are finding ways to put at least a few limits on their use. We aren't taking away the phones. Just regulating them, and just for a few hours each day.
Perhaps we can start to see ways to not just settle for "facts of life."
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