The only real question in my mind is which is it? Already over? Or still ending? The answer depends on how one defines it, including when it is/was/will be, and why.
I’m one of the original baby boomers. I grew up in America, a country which was prospering, when veterans benefits included a good education and a real chance at a middle class house. I was also white, in a mostly white rural area, rich in lakes and trees and wildlife, all of which I loved. Immunizations were coming along at a speedy rate so lots of childhood illnesses were a thing left behind us. Medicines were being developed for those which weren’t. Schools taught what we believed we needed, including how wonderful we were as a country. Agriculture, innovation, and transportation growth provided us with increasing prosperity. We began to assume our children would live, a new thing for our species. We believed we could control this planet. We could dream of walking on the moon, of our own children and grandchildren perhaps standing on other planets. The future was out there beckoning all of us.
This is where you are probably ready to chime in and tell your own stories of how wonderful or terrible your own specific childhoods were. Argue if you must, but this is the world I grew up in, even if partly on its edges. It was a mindset, perhaps a delusion, but a lot of forces backed it. I have since learned that I was both sheltered and naive, unaware of all that was really happening in the world or even to others in this very country. I haven’t stayed naive, after all. My own set of hard knocks came along. But much of that basic optimism stayed with me. Things ALWAYS had the possibility of getting better. Then, anyway.
That has ended. I became politically aware, started realizing what was happening in the rest of the world, began to question my values, beliefs, circumstances. I made stupid mistakes as well as inadvertent ones, though I like to believe I didn’t make malicious ones. I failed myself and others and came to realize I had. I look at that time and figure that was me finally growing up, facing the real world. Years of support groups and even some therapy put me mostly at peace with myself and set on a better path. Back then there still was a better path.
New innovations flooded the world, for those who could manage to own and understand them, and chose to. Board games turned into game machines became smart phones and Siri and ubiquitous cameras recording us wherever we went over along series of years: progress for many, threats for some. Clear skies became hazy, rivers and land polluted as well, resources started threatening to run out. Medical innovations allowed us to overpopulate our planet while wars became deadlier from a distance, and pandemic threats blossomed. Plastics, seen as a miracle, became a deadly threat to our oceans, often ignored because we don’t live in them. Chemicals which promised better living also provided more ways of becoming ill and dying. Our perceived needs and rights destroyed habitats and contributed to extinctions.
Human rights gained a foothold in a lot of the world. We began to recognize women, different races and ethnicities, people with different abilities, different gender and sexual orientations, as fully human, fully equal, though not without blowback. Advances in DNA research gave us better understandings of how alike we are, even how close to other species we are. Archeologists made inroads on understanding the length of our history, the technologies of our much-dismissed forebearers as well as their migrations, tying us to them in millennia of continuity despite our branching out, yet not erasing our innate tribalism.
Our long stable climate became unstable, just now beginning to bring more extremes of all kinds to the places where we live and try to raise crops to feed ourselves as well as the animals we also consume. Our food supply is no longer dependable. Our housing is no longer dependable. Our progress as a species is no longer dependable. In fact our very survival as a species is no longer dependable, as all these processes we’ve set in motion start to come crashing down around us.
One can easily declare we deserve it. We are clever, we humans, wise not so much. We look at the now, and the yesterdays, not our tomorrows. We still fight over the same things we fought over thousands of years ago, but now some of them have different names. We have been busily depleting our planet of our rich resources, so even if new civilizations of humans arise from our ashes, they will live more primitively than we do now. Landfills will be their mines for metals or fuels, but the riches within will be widely scattered and in tiny pieces. Perhaps they will not even be understood.
I have lived in the golden age of humans on this planet. I have also lived long enough to see the beginning of its end. I can decide to consider myself lucky to have been born when and where I was. I can also decide to consider myself tragic in having to witness the end unfolding. I have grandchilden and great grandchildren. I fear for how their lives will turn out, what they will have to go through to survive, if they can survive. I assume my generation will be blamed. While I didn’t intend that I’m sure I’ve made my contribution to it, and can accept that blame, with regrets.
My last bit of luck is probably going to be that I’m unlikely to live long enough to see all the consequences of what we all have wrought here. However, I have a well educated and informed imagination, which doesn’t happen to encompass the concept that we can “out-technology” what’s coming. Hubris has long been a human trait.
I will grieve. I’ve already started that process, as I’m sure some of you who’ve read my comments on climate change realize. I will also do my best to share the pieces of this life which have meaning. I will hug my friends and my family, try to remember the kinder ways of passing on what I think I know, while remaining open to what I still have to learn. I have learned to listen and will try to retain and use that skill while I can. I will continue every day to tell that dear man next to me how much value he still has in this world, despite the ravages of age. While I still can, I will continue pulling the weeds out of the garden outside the door so it can continue to bring joy and beauty to those who will see it.
And I will always write, so long as the fingers move and the mind insists. Because it does. No matter for how much or little longer. No matter how little of it will remain behind, no matter how little of it will affect anything or anyone. But it too will be coming to its end.