The Kids are All Right
In 2010 there was a movie that may have missed your screen. It was with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo and it was called The Kids are All Right. It is a story about three adults in a love triangle specifically because of two of them having parented a few kids who were coming of age. As America and the world ages day-by-day, I suspect we will get more and more stories in all forms about how the older generation is getting through its last stages of life while worrying about how the kids and their kids are likely to fair in the future we have teed up for them. I wrote in 2013 about the scary aspects of the global pension crisis and why there was an insufficient amount of savings set aside to provide a comfortable and humane retirement for the older generation. But I was and am less worried about the older generation as much as I am worried about the younger generations. I think that is a natural tendency for all beings, whether human or not. It is hardwired into all living things to perpetuate their kind to the best of their ability. Nature is not always as dramatic as the praying mantis where the male gets consumed after he procreates or the fruit fly that lives only long enough to give birth to the next generation. But at some point during our lifespan, we simply cease to be the reason for existence and that reason passes to our children and their children and there are few among us who would not sacrifice everything for our descendants if called upon. It is also in our nature to worry whether the kids are really all right or perhaps up to the challenge.
Today is an exciting day around this hilltop. My daughter and her family, which includes our two granddaughters, are coming to stay with us for five weeks. That is a source of great joy to both Kim and me and a span of time we have never gotten before with them. We have five weeks of activities planned for them that are clearly geared to the things they like to do. In fact, they head off tomorrow for two days at Universal Studios. The big Disneyland visit will come later in July, as will the visits to the Zoo, the Safari Park and probably Legoland. But the main event is ten days that we will all spend on the road, not to Wallyworld, but to the magical land of southern Utah and the Grand Canyon. There will be Llama walks, UTV rides, pony rides, pie-eating contests, trout fishing, Bison watching (from a distance, thank you very much), Pando viewing (Pando being the world’s largest and oldest living being….a 140 acres stand of root-connected Aspen trees), canyon rim overlooking and ghost-town meandering. For me, the best part about it will be that we will be joined in Utah by my other two kids and another 40 or so family and friends in a reunion-like gathering where we will all be staying in a fabulous western lodge. We will be at The Lodge at Red River Ranch, what could be more Americana than that? We will end our stay with a Utah Summer Games field day with a weenie roast and s’mores and cowboy hats and bandanas. It should be a hoot.
I like to say that the Bank of Dad never closes and never bothers to print deposit slips, and I suspect everyone who I say that to understands the phenomenon well. My generation has had it good. Some of us have been luckier than others, but we have had relative peace in the world compared to our parents generation or their parent’s. We have had record prosperity and lifestyle improvement that has come along with leaps in technology and dramatic reductions of the world ills, even though they are far from eliminated. We worry whether there is enough growth left for our kids to thrive on. But wait, the most recent studies are telling us that Millennials and Gen Z are doing better than even we did at their age. The funny thing is that the Millennials and Gen Z students I had last semester don’t believe that yet. They still think that we Boomers are making things harder for them to get career and prosperity traction.
This is all one of the reasons I am most positive about what Joe Biden is out on the road touting today, what the campaign and the press has chosen to call Bidenomics. That represents Biden’s version of how Americans can recapture the American Dream through a broadening of the middle class, especially by advancing made-in-Ameircan and union strength. It’s funny to think that no one ever tried to turn Trump or Bush into economic phenomena (other than for tax cutting) the way we had it with Clinton and Reagan. But the Wall Street Journal has published a very balanced and realistic analysis about why Americans are having a hard time swallowing Bidenomics as a good thing. It all boils down to that old nature versus nurture or nature versus grace phenomenon we all understand. Jay Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois at the Northwestern University Commencement ceremony explained that human nature teaches us to be cruel to survive. But he goes on to say that we are supposed to transcend that as human beings and evolve from survival instinct to a more enlightened state when kindness and empathy can replace cruelty as a way of being. That agrees with my own sense of the rationale as to why cruelty and evil are ever-present in the world. Until we can transcend the harshest aspects of life for the largest number of humans, we will be plagued by cruelty because people will be struggling to survive. And here’s the thing, eliminating cruelty through violent eradication never works. It’s like pulling weeds, every weed pulled releases the cruelty spores for forty more.
I understand that requires a leap of faith to overcome, but what choice do we have? I am certain that is what is behind the notion of turning the other cheek in Biblical thinking. It is only by taking that risk that we can make the leap to a higher plane. And yet it is unclear how we get people to see the glass half full rather than half empty. When I tell my red friends that I am impressed with what Biden has done since being president, they are shocked and appalled. They are sure that he hasn’t done a good job and mostly that he is responsible for the high inflation we have suffered, notwithstanding the impacts of COVID, Ukraine, corporate profit margin greed, the fact that inflation has risen globally, or that inflation is receding quickly now. It is interesting how much the immigration issue has disappeared off the list of top talking points now that border numbers have gone down so dramatically. The other thought that always comes through is that policies like Bidenomics will be costly to the ordinary citizen in the form of higher taxes, and that simply need not be.
Through the invalid (even if well-intended) trickle-down economic theories of supply-side thinking, by now thoroughly debunked with a great deal of empirical evidence that started in Reagan’s era and culminated in Trump’s unabashed tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate, we have lost our way as we knew it in the most uplifting and progressive of post-WWII decades. Nobody likes taxes, but everybody loves enabling infrastructure, and the definition of necessary, productive and enabling infrastructure has broadened from roads and bridges to broadband and cybersecurity as well as less uniformly understood things like childcare, healthcare and educational infrastructure. Those are the things that make a society more productive in an 8 billion person world. We need to start thinking that way if we are really going to look ourselves in the mirror and say to ourselves that the kids are all right.