World has changed much in almost 80 years

Recently I turn 79, or as my grandfather would have put it: I am entering my 80th year. After nearly eight decades on this planet, it seems appropriate to reflect on the changes I have observed.

Many years ago I thought of the changes my mother’s mother saw over her lifetime — born in 1890 and living to the 1980s. Although I have a ways to go to achieve her 97 years, nevertheless some interesting contrasts seem apparent. Grandmom saw sweeping technological changes. When she was a girl, automobiles, except as a few toys for the very wealthy, did not exist. She was 13 when the Wright brothers lifted off. Grandmom never flew in an airplane or drove a car. Electric lights and telephones existed, but hardly for everyone.

What Grandmom did not see, despite the sweeping technological changes, was a profound shift in the nature of the nation. It was a Christian nation when she was born, and remained unapologetically so until very late in her life. It was a country which believed in itself, and believed it was a shining beacon on the hill, an illumination to the rest of the world of what was possible with freedom and progress.

Problems there were, but these could be solved by goodwill, by hard work, by understanding history as a march to an ever-better life for all. Communities were strong and cohesive, and people pulled together in the harness — or at least all this was so believed. God was in His Heaven, God had greatly blessed America, and all would eventually be right with the world. Her generation marched off to a world war to see that the blessings of liberty and self-determination could be spread to all. The “War to End All Wars.”

Her daughter — my mother — didn’t live nearly long enough to see much change. Born in 1917 and dying in 1962, the world she knew matched the world, more or less, into which she had been born. But I, born in 1942 and coming of age in the 1950s, have seen the world and this nation change profoundly.

There have been considerable technological advances since the 1950s, but not nearly as profound as Grandmom saw. My first car, a 1953 Ford, got me around as well as my latest car, a 2021 Mazda 6. There are many bells and whistles on the Mazda that did not exist on the Ford, but the basic device hasn’t changed at all. 

Air travel has gotten better — more or less — since I first flew on a four-engine prop from Cleveland to Chicago, but again the basic device has stayed the same. Indeed, since the advent of the Boeing 707, in the same year I took that flight, air travel hasn’t advanced at all, at least from the standpoint of the traveler. In fact, it has gotten worse — much worse — as a result of the sweeping changes I have seen: the optimistic, can do, Godly nation Grandmom and I were both born into is, to plagiarize a title, gone with the wind.

The cultural elites who dominate our schools, government, media and all the other leading institutions of this land have evolved into a shriveled empty shell of what elites were in 1942. Can do has become mustn't do. The dreams of what could be done when I was young have become nightmares adumbrating the death of the planet thanks to carbon dioxide. Health and safety at all costs have replaced bold adventure, exploration, and fun playgrounds. From birth to death we are now bubble wrapped, masked — and thoroughly searched before we get on that planet-destroying plane.

God is dead. Marriage is rapidly becoming passe. Child-bearing is politically incorrect. Communities of all kinds are declining as the lone individual, cosseted by the government, substitutes a relationship with an electronic device for a relationship with a fellow human.

Those born this day, I fear, will live in a far darker world as unrecognizable to me as today would be to Grandmom.

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.