15 years

Antoinette is planning her son’s first birthday party; she told me that in lieu of gifts, she wants guests to bring items for a time capsule that she’ll give to Luca on his 16th birthday. It’s a brilliant idea and I’m not surprised by it, because that girl tends to be disgustingly creative!

Her focus is on items that will be useful to Luca when he’s 16. Well, aside from condoms (which were suggested by another one of her friends), I don’t know what he’ll define as useful in 15 years’ time because I’m not sure how his personality will evolve. Will he be an athlete? An artist? A budding journalist? A wannabe architect? Will he have a passion for old cars? For dinosaurs? For playing the violin?

Because I don’t know what items will be useful to him, I think I’ll focus instead on “this is what life was like in 2007” items. Copies of Time and Entertainment Weekly, a newspaper, a compilation CD of today’s most popular songs, a New York Times bestseller. Things that serve as a snapshot of modern life. And I’ll write him a letter describing what the world is like at this moment in time. I can’t say what it’s like for someone who’s 16, because I’m not 16 and I don’t even know any 16 year olds. I suppose I can hazard a guess, though, based on technology and trends. What I do know is blazingly obvious: life for today’s 16 year old is wildly different than it was for me when I was 16 in 1990. I may as well try to compare a teenager’s life in 1957 to a teenager’s life in 2007.

In some ways modern teens have it better than my peers did, because cyberspace and mobile communications have made the world much smaller, and this can be a great comfort to kids who feel restricted by the confines of their immediate surroundings. I was a raging Anglophile at age 16 and would’ve given anything to obtain easy access to British newspapers, magazines, products, and TV shows. That access didn’t exist back then, but nowadays it does in the form of the internet. In other ways I think my classmates and I were better off than today’s teens. At the very least, we didn’t have to worry about cyber-bullying, text bullying, and getting embarrassing videos of us posted on YouTube by vicious classmates. There was a kind of purity nestled in the note-passing we did in school, in the old-fashioned letters we had to write in order to keep in touch with penpals or friends who lived far away. Sure, we could’ve phoned them, but with no free nighttime minutes, not everyone had the money to make a ton of calls to someone in a different state or country. Patience was taught to us in the form of waiting until the family phone was free before we could make a call (no cell phones, after all), and having to try again and again to reach someone when his or her line was busy (nobody I knew had call waiting at that time).

So I try to imagine the impossible and think ahead to Luca as a 16-year-old boy in 2022. God, we’ll be speaking a whole other language by then, just like the language we speak now is different from that which was spoken 15 years ago. I mean, think about it. Suppose a guy walked up to you in 1992 and started talking about digital camera megapixels, satellite radio, WiFi, SUVs, blogging, GPS, emailing friends on Blackberries and Treos, IMing people in chat rooms, surfing the Web on a laptop, Netflixing a DVD to search for Easter eggs, Mapquesting directions, eBaying, Googling himself, texting on his Razr, TiVoing American Idol on his plasma HDTV, friending people on MySpace, playing with a Wii, shooting a video of Brangelina on his cameraphone and uploading it to YouTube, playing MP3s on his iPod Nano, looking for a BFF to LOL with on match.com…would you even realize that he’s speaking English? Would you believe him if he told you that the human genome has been mapped, a rover has photographed the surface of Mars, a cancer vaccine (Gardasil, for HPV) is now available, space tourists exist, and we’re all the verge of figuring out how to manufacture stem cells? Although we’re all still eating and shitting and walking around like we did in 1992, I think 2007 would sound like a foreign country to your average 1992 resident.

I can’t imagine what we’ll be saying and doing in 15 years. I can’t imagine what advances will be made in science, what technology will be enhanced and perfected by then, or made obsolete. I’d like to think that 15 years from now, society will have made some progress in the right direction. I’d like to think we’ll have slowed down or halted global warming, eradicated our need for oil, figured out how to dissolve terrorism at its root (or, at the very least, know how to protect ourselves from it without sacrificing civil liberties in the process). I’d like to think healthcare will be universal and poverty will be alleviated; gay people will have the right to marry; we’ll finally have a cure for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc. I’d like to think we’ll know how to respect each other and create a better world. Wishful thinking, huh?

We could take a turn in the wrong direction: dystopian novels and movies come to mind. V for Vendetta. Children of Men. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984. Sometimes it feels like we’re headed there, that the next 15 years will bring us under the heel of a totalitarian regime or crush us with a worldwide superplague or some other disaster plucked from our most paranoid fears. Other times I have hope that we’ll manage to get our shit together and figure out what we most need to learn: the idea that the planet isn’t disposable, that underneath skin and faith and genitals and sexual desire we’re all the same. We’re all the same. We’re all a bunch of vulnerable, lost creatures living on the membrane of a lonely rock bobbing in space, and we’re all we’ve got. We’re the only ones who can look out for, and protect, each other. We’re our only line of defense. Tearing each other and the planet apart won’t solve any problems.

For now, though, I’ll tell Luca about where the world currently stands—not where I hope it goes. It’s a messy, silly, absurd, complicated, divine world. Humanity is the same as ever: we stretch toward evolution and advancement and sometimes we make it, while other times we fall into the same old ruts, digging the same old destructive graves. There’s still racism, sexism, and war. Pedophiles, criminals, and suicide bombers still shadow the streets. There’s still pollution and poverty. Tensions still run high between certain countries. People are more fixated on Paris Hilton’s release from jail than they are on the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. More people vote for American Idol contestants than they do for politicians. A shocking amount of people have no access to education or healthcare or even clean water. Obesity is skyrocketing and yet people are dying every day from starvation, either because they can’t afford food or because Hollywood has set this ridiculous standard wherein being a size zero means being beautiful.

But, you know, there’s still plenty of loveliness out there amidst all the terror and atrocities and apathy. There’s still art, music, beauty. People still create. They still help one another, give to charities, volunteer their time and services. This 2007 world of ours still holds compassion. Sometimes wallets get returned unopened. Sometimes someone will offer his or her seat on a crowded train to a pregnant woman, or will offer to mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn, or will step forward to help a person who’s being attacked. Sometimes friendships last and nations align and families are functional. Sometimes it seems like we’re going to be okay in the end. And as long as we have that we at least have something.


song heard most recently before posting:
Farewell—Yo-Yo Ma