Growing Up COVID
When I was growing up I was influenced most by two wars. First there was WWII with it’s amazing sea-based battles. The visual images of dive bombers and Kamikazes buzzing like flies around battleships and aircraft carriers were vivid in my minds eye to the point of being the subject of many of my childhood drawing efforts. As for the ground battles in Europe, the landings at Anzio and Normandy were only further punctuated with scenes of the Ardennes Forrest and the Battle of the Bulge as Patton’s tank brigades were scorching the earth across the continent headed for the evils housed in Berlin. That war cost the United States 291,557 lives during a grueling four years of fighting and shortages on the home front.
And then, before I could catch my metaphorical breath, we were in Vietnam up to our necks. I missed the Korean conflict altogether and only really became acutely aware of it once M*A*S*H brought it all to life for me. I lived through the Gulf of Tonkin, the Tet Offensive, Khe Sanh, My Lai and the Fall of Saigon. There were 58,220 deaths of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam over ten years, but it sure seemed like more for those of us living through the domestic strife it caused back stateside.
My granddaughters Charlotte and Evelyn are eight and five. They are living through their memorable and impressionable early years and I doubt that Afghanistan with its twenty-year U.S, war, which resulted in 2,401 deaths, will leave much of a lasting impression. Their equivalent foundational and seminal life event will be the two-year COVID war we are living through that has cost the U.S, 700,000 lives so far. That has to leave a mark on them that can mostly be drawn on paper as people wearing masks wherever they go….and Zoom meeting for school replacing face-to-face classroom interaction for more than a year. In fact, I imagine COVID does more to mould their psyches that WWII, Korea and Vietnam ever did for people of my generation. Like WWII, it has been a global fight, but there have been no landmark battlefields to rally around or go and visit on class trips (what the hell are those, anyway, to a kid today).
When I think about my children and what world events shaped their lives similarly. It is relatively easy to spot what is seared into my son Thomas’ mind. He is one of the kids of NYC and is thus a child of 9/11. He was in First Grade at Little Red School in the West Village, a mere 1.5 miles north of where the twin towers stood. His First Grade classroom window was taped up when I went there to retrieve him that day, not so much from the blast, but from the visual destruction of the iconic buildings that had been the centerpiece of that downtown view. He lived in lower Manhattan his whole life and knew the pain of the weeks that followed that heinous event and the 2,977 lives that were lost there that day. He knew none of them personally, but knew them all collectively as victims of terrorism that haunted the days of his childhood.
I am trying to think of what may be the equivalent world events that may have marked the memories of my two older children, Roger and Carolyn. The best I can figure for deadly events are the Challenger Disaster that took seven high-profile lives, the Desert Storm war that claimed 147 U.S. lives, the Oklahoma City bombing that cost 147 lives and the first big mass school shooting at Columbine High School, that left fifteen dead. If I had to pick only one event though that impacted their young lives, I think it was the Ghostbusters attack on New York that cost the life of the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man when Venkman, Spangler and Stantz crossed the streams of their proton energy packs and blew him to marshmallow bits.
I believe that with reflection and the counting of lives, we can all agree that the COVID Pandemic is a more impactful event that has shaped the lives of the young and the old over the past two years, more than any other trauma over the past century. Strangely enough, it came almost exactly a century after the last catastrophic pandemic, the Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918, which struck down an estimated 25-50 million souls worldwide. That translated into 675,000 deaths in the United States. Imagine that, the deadliest pandemic in the history of man took a similar number of American lives as COVID. But that belies it’s impact. As a nation we had only one third the current population, so it’s fair to say that the impact in 1918 was FAR greater than COVID’s.
And yet, while we grew up thinking of lives driven by the paucity of the Great Depression or the devastation of either WWI or WWII, I don’t recall ever hearing stories about people scarred by the ravages of the 1918 Pandemic. I’ve never once heard about how it might have changed the course of human history the ways those other events drove the children of that era to be who they became. I’m sure there must have been an impact, but it is interesting that it isn’t recorded prominently in the annals. The Black Death lasted seven years and brought with it up to 250 million deaths. We all know from our Western Civilization courses that it is credited with the coming of the Renaissance and the reawakening of the modern world.
I don’t know what the COVID crisis will do to my granddaughters much less to the cultural and social evolution of the world at large. It is sure to affect our lives for years to come and may only be matched by how Climate Change will alter us forever. I do know that in a world of 8 billion people, we need to be more concerned about the rampant spread of disease and the ability to access sufficient clean air and clean water to continue to make life even possible. Nature is intuitive enough to systemically temper growth in whatever way it comes at it. The earth is finite and cannot just ignore the limitations it embodies. Man’s need for growth is far less intuitive and is systematically intemperate. If the earth is bounded by its resource constraints, man is bounded by his intemperance.
What I want for my granddaughters is that growing up COVID will be an ingrained (dare I say intuitive?) lesson in how to better live their lives in an era when we really do need to be more concerned for our neighbors, not just for the goodness of our immortal souls, but for the betterment of our mortal well-being.