"these are unprecedented times,"

says every generation

Our LA family came to visit for five days - my daughter Hannah, husband George, and their daughter Miriam. The setting for our visit — a house on the banks of the Eastern Shore of Maryland — seemed to suit “Mim’s” capacious imagination. Even as I type, the bocce balls and beanbags arranged in the side yard represent her garden, the product of an early morning land reform effort. The rug in the sun room is an ever-shifting collage of toys, hackysacks, stuffed animals and a tea set. You might not think it was the setting for a tea party because of the number of maracas, but it was. On a nearby table, we have each made a wooden duck shape with a clothespin for a beak. She painted hers yellow and orange and calls it Chicky.

Chickie the duck Photo - Busy Graham

She is a tall, lanky gal with long fine hair, blue eyes and lots of questions about the world, about how things work, what words mean, why people act the way they do. Lots of questions. She’s an amazing blend of curiosity (“Will the box turtle eat a strawberry?”) and opinions (“I have a recommendation,” she offered, on the color thumbtack to use for my clothespin-duck project.)

Before they came east to visit two of the three sets of grandparents, Hannah wrote me an email, in part in response to my previous essay on industrialization run amok a hundred years ago (Saltville, part 2). Many young new parents have more than a little anxiety raising children in a world of rising authoritarianism, political violence, climate doom, etc. She wanted to queue up a question to explore sometime during our visit. Paraphrasing here:

I guess the question is whether every generation feels they are living through “unprecedented times” and the associated upheaval, or whether we [Millennials and our offspring] are uniquely [imperiled].

This got me thinking. My parents lived through the Great Depression and World War II. I was raised in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Viet Nam war, and all the civil unrest and political assassinations of the 1960s. My children were born during the AIDS crisis when slow government response and the spread of misinformation made matters worse. Mim was born during COVID when slow government response and the spread of misinformation again made matters worse.

I keep coming back to a couple of notions. First, there is evidence to be pessimistic about where the world is trending, and we are not helped by the negativity bias that is hardwired in our species. We are primed to worry. How is my grandchild and her Gen Alpha cohorts going to cope with the unprecedented series of events that unwind the democratic norms and the global ecosystem that we know and depend on?

The second notion that I keep coming back to is Victor Frankl’s. In his 1946 “Man’s Search for Meaning” this Austrian neurologist and Holocaust survivor posits:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Any given set of circumstances. Not just the ones we can imagine ahead of time. Every generation since the industrial revolution has arguably been preparing their children for a world that will — in some significant ways — be unrecognizable to the parents. And yet here we stand, generation after generation.

Mim was in the midst of her tea party on the big carpet. There were many attendees and she had different voices for each of them. Hard to tell exactly what was going on. Stuffed animals were dancing, that much was clear. And there was a scene where something — a tea cup? — took a ride in tambourine hovercraft accompanied by a soundtrack alternating between an anthem to friendship and a narrative voiceover.

In a parallel play scenario, Hannah and I were on the sofa where she was teaching me about podcasts which, although they had been popular for over two decades, still represented a mystery to dad. What should I listen to? How do I subscribe? Where do the episodes “live?” On my phone? My daughter was very patient. Then she laughed — imagining a time 20 years from now, when Miriam’s patience will be tested by her mom’s tech unsavviness:

• Mom! I can’t believe you still have an iPhone!

• You don’t have to type anymore, Mom. Just pull up the hologram and point, like this…

• Mom. Just stop. Please. Let the robot do it.

In 20 years, the big question in the mind of Mim: Does every generation have to help their parents cope with a changing world? Or is Gen Alpha facing an unprecedented challenge?

Hard to say. Meanwhile, it’s always tea time somewhere.

Tea party in full swing Photo - Busy Graham