September 1, 2019
As we Baby Boomers cycle out of the food chain and into oblivion, some of us, myself included, have become less tolerant and a bit more cranky.
In downtown Missoula, Montana, I paused underneath the shade of a storefront awning to check the time on my iPhone. On the corner, three young women were engaged in an animated conversation. During a short chunk of that conversation, one of the women used the word like four times in one sentence.
“I, like, opened my front door and, like, Billy was standing right there and he, like, had a weird look on his face and he said, like, Is this a good time?”
“The incredibly irritating American English socio dialect known as Valleyspeak evolved during the 1970s in California’s San Fernando Valley. In the 1980s, the verbal tic like went viral with the help of the movie “Valley Girl” and with Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl,” in which his daughter, Moon Zappa, impersonates a California bimbo, ad libbing… I, like, love going into, like, clothing stores and stuff and, like, buying the neatest miniskirts. It’s, like, so bitchin.’”
It wouldn’t be so bad if like had faded away with the 1980s Valley Girls and not spread like a virus from coast to coast, first infecting the teens and later slithering into the 21st century utterances of TV news readers, play-by-play sports announcers, waitresses and celebrities… like, you know?
My newsfeed is full of clickbait, headlines designed to suck me in like the carney's spiel at the county fair, promising a look at the two-headed snake and the lamb with six legs. This week my favorite laugh-out-loud clickbait was “You’ve been peeling bananas wrong all your life.” I start every morning with five gulps of low-sodium V-8 juice and a banana. I have been peeling well over 300 bananas per year, always breaking the banana open from the stem. Oh, how wrong I have been. I stand corrected.
At some point in my lifetime, the tabloid approach to the news spread from the magazine rack at the supermarket checkout lane to TV cable news and internet news. Back in the old days, National Enquirer cover stories featured headlines like “Wind Blows Midget Balloon Peddler Twenty Miles” and “Redneck Aliens Take Over Trailer Park.” These days, thanks to the nationwide obsession with murder, shows like “Dateline” and “20/20” drag us through a gruesome, tragic hour of fact-finding that begins with bloody crime scene photos from 1983 and the discovery of the body in the trunk of a sedan pulled from “the bottom of the lake,” then thirty years later, thanks to advances in DNA technology, the episode ends by destroying any chance for satisfying, karmic closure by telling us that the killer died in prison while serving time for burglary.
My friend asked, “What do you think this country will be like in the year 2100?” Before I answered, I, the History major, asked my friend to accept that one relatively healthy human lifetime is 80 years.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland.
Add 80 years to 1939 and we have today, September 1, 2019. For just a moment, tick through the decades and contemplate the major events and discoveries that have occurred between 1939 and 2019… one lifetime.
Subtract 80 years from 1939 and you will find yourself in 1859, reading about abolitionist John Brown’s anti-slavery raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the prologue to the Civil War.
Subtract one lifetime from 1859 and you’ll find yourself in the middle of the American Revolutionary War, from “the shot heard ‘round the world” in 1775 to the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
80 years from now, it will be 2099, a mere four lifetimes from the American Revolution. Based on the history of the last 10,000 years, and the short time we have been Americans, my guess is that the heart and soul of humanity worldwide, that combo plate of good and evil, will be the “same as it ever was.” Our luxuries, eating habits, clothing styles and methods of creating mayhem will change, but at our core, the human animal will stay the same. We are still in the early stages… and we seem hellbent on clinging to our thoughtless, primitive, short-term thinking as, daily, we steamroll our way forward as “constantly agitated, appetent organisms.”
Population of the Earth in 1779: 900 million.
1859: 1.3 billion… 1939: 2.2 billion… 2019: 7.7 billion.
If you are interested in sanity and world peace, overpopulation is a turn in the wrong direction.
The Earth is a closed system.
With our habits and attitudes and addictions and madness, we are destroying Eden.