A New...Generation?

     We live in a time of hurry; Nex-gen (which Forbes describes as those born 1984 onward) nnd Gen Z (generally those born 1997 or later) are just two of these abbreviated labels.   It's as if the era of unsigned holiday cards, memes, and quick Apple "like" replies are becoming out new form of pidgin Engish.  I grew up with speaking pidgin in Hawaii, where a simple question such as "are you hungry" simply became, "you hungry" in pidgin.   So to back up a bit, I claim zero knowledge of Gen Z, or millennials, or you for that matter; in fact I know next to nothing about any "labeled" group which we  lump into convenient categories: religions, races, age groups, diseases, insects, and generally, life itself.  It's easy to think that we feel that we can more easily understand others by doing this, but every bit of life is individual, which may in itself prove difficult to comprehend.  I tend to think of the song from Hawaii, a pidgin version by the Beamer Brothers that pointed out that even in the "melting pot" of Hawaii, there were many stereotypes and simply noted: One thing I can say about this place; always making fun the other race; it's a wonder we can life in the same place.

     Several recent things brought this quick-to-judge, quick-to-label subject to the forefront, one being some comments by young Gen-Z'ers in TIME, and the other being a supernova.  So first, the comments in TIME, an essay that began with this startling set of statistics from 2021 from the CDC which showed: ...42% of U.S. high school students said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, 29% reported experiencing poor mental health, 22% had seriously considered suicide, and 10% had attempted suicide.  Adding onto that, some of the comments from the article included these: "School feels a little less safe than it used to be," from an 11-year old; "Who's going to have my back for me?" from a 12-year old; "It's like I'm not able to trust anybody at this point," from a 13-year old; and from a 14-year old, "I wish adults would be more understanding."   As former ambassador to England, Raymond Seitz, wrote in his book Over Here, he early on encountered the views of a quaint widow at the inn where he was staying, views which gave him a preview of how those across "the Pond" might see us: ...in the days that followed, she went on the scold me pleasantly about every topic that cropped up, particularly when the subject concerned the inadequacies of the United States and how Americans might improve themselves.  Americans had no sense of ceremony, for example.  Americans were too rich.  American children were spoiled.  Americans were too loud.  Over many cups of milky tea, she laid out this catalogue of national failure.  When I asked her if she had ever been to America, she shook her head.  England was a country where things were done right, so there wasn't much point in going anywhere else.  Hmm, I wish adults were more understanding, he must have felt...or was that just an echo from a child?

Photo: JPL/NASA

     Then came this in Smithsonian, the James Webb telescope capturing a supernova, a star once 16 times the mass of our sun (which alone can hold nearly a million Earths) that collapsed.  Here's a better explanation from physics professor Brian Cox in his book, Wonders of Life: Supernovae are the most violent explosions in the Universe -- they release so much energy that they can outshine an entire galaxy.  The last supernova visible to the naked eye from Earth was the Kepler supernova, which burst into the night sky on 9 October 1604, outshining every other star there, even though it was 20,000 light years away.  These rare, spectacular events are both devastating and productive, releasing vast amounts of energy needed to force nuclei together to make the heaviest elements.  Every atom of gold and silver on Earth today, including those locked up in the jewelry you might be wearing while reading this...was produced in the last violent moments of a long-dead star.  The reason why such extreme conditions are necessary to produce the heaviest elements is that they don't really want to be together.  All elements heavier than iron (which is only the 26th out of the 92 naturally occurring elements) would in general be happier in lighter bits.  The heaviest elements, such as uranium and thorium, achieve this by naturally decaying into lighter elements given enough time -- this is what we call radioactivity.  When they do so, they release a small amount of the energy used to form them back into the Universe, because energy is always conserved, it would be correct to think of these heavy nuclei as batteries, storing a tiny fraction of the energy of an ancient supernova explosion.  When the Earth formed, part of the collapsing dust cloud was made up of these radioactive elements, and because they are heavy, they quickly sank towards the planet's core.  They have remained deep underground ever since, decaying slowly and releasing ancient stellar power into the beating heart of out planet.  Our Earth is powered by nuclear energy, whether we like it or not!

     Two of his phrases stuck out to me: "whether we like it or not" and "they don't really want to be together."  It would almost appear that we have our own supernova going on here on Earth.  According to the Geneva Academy, there are currently over 108 warring conflicts still happening across a quarter of our planet (Wikipedia breaks it down further into those with 10,000+ deaths, 1000+ deaths, etc.).  And the year is almost, but not quite over.  How can this be?  As one of the early principal arguers for democratic reform (and an influencer of George Washington's ideals) Thomas Paine wrote: Whether...civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested.  [Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.  Added Fintan O'Toole in a review in The New York Review: Tribalism is attractive to politicians, because in many ways it is easier than democracy.  It abolishes democracy’s inconvenient demand for accountability: failure to deliver real benefits to one’s community is forgivable so long as the other side is faring worse...But perhaps the greatest advantage of tribalization is that it solves the problems of identity.  The phrase “identity politics” is a misnomer.  Tribal politics do not in fact deal in collective identities, which are always complex, contradictory, multiple, and slippery.  They reduce the difficult “us” to the easy “not them.”  Going back to the days of the Enlightenment, O'Toole adds: It has to be acknowledged that there are good historical reasons for skepticism about the Enlightenment’s claims to have articulated values for humanity as a whole.  It’s not merely that the violence of slavery and colonialism exposed the hypocrisy of many of those who claimed to hold those values.  It is that the very idea that one was enlightened justified the domination of those who were not.  In his eye-opening account of what is happening in the Gaza conflict (to date, the toll by Israel has been nearly 17 Palestinians killed --including children and women-- for every 1 Israeli), Adam Shatz wrote in LRB: In the West, few remember that when Palestinians from Gaza protested at the border in 2018-19 during the Great March of Return, Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators.  But Palestinians do, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators has only added to the allure of armed struggle.*

     When Charles P. Pierce was told by his editor at Esquire to write about the future, he wrote: I couldn’t write with any authority about what I think will happen next week, let alone 4,680 weeks from now...{By fall 1933] FDR had been president for seven months.  He already had created the Tennessee Valley Authority and made the stock market subject to the Federal Trade Commission.  Meanwhile, in Germany, Adolf Hitler had laid most of the groundwork for what we would later know as the Holocaust.  In Russia, Joseph Stalin had inaugurated the Holodomor in Ukraine.  By June 1933, twenty-eight thousand people a day would be starving to death.  The horrors of the 1940s were gathering, but for the first time in four years, the people of the United States were looking to the future with an unfamiliar form of optimism.  Happy days were here again...It is different today.  A child born on Esquire’s ninetieth has no such birthright.  Nothing ahead looks bright or golden; everything looks to be entirely unexpected, which now appears ominous.  I can no longer talk or write about the future with any confidence or authority.  Your guess is as good as mine -- better, probably.  Then came this headline from NPR: U.S. reading and math scores drop to lowest level in decades.  

     The Sun magazine came out with an online statement that stated: In recent weeks we have witnessed the ongoing tragedies in the Middle East --the October 7 attack on Israel and the killing and displacement of innocent civilians in Gaza-- with a mix of fear, anger, and grief.  We want to make our stance clear: we are pro-peace.  All systems of oppression reinforce one another.  And with that, they re-featured a story of two unlikely friends -- Bassam Aramin, a Muslim Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, a Jewish Israeli-- both of whom fought on opposite side but became such good friends that they formed Combatants for Peace in 2006, a movement of both Israeli and Palestinian soldiers, a movement which hopes to serve: ...as a role model for both people, demonstrating through action that there is a real alternative to the cycle of violence.  Said Elhanan in part of the interview: I said it is fashionable to feel despair, but people truly are despairing.  We have a right-wing government that is gathering unlimited power and creating fascist laws that never existed before in this country.  So of course people feel despair.  But for someone like me, who has already experienced the worst, what else is there but to be hopeful?  Should we kill ourselves?...Every society tries to mold the next generation according to its values and to prepare the youth to sacrifice themselves in war to protect those values.  It is practiced on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.  It’s done through demonization and dehumanization of the other.  This process is so sophisticated that when you try to reach people with a different narrative, you encounter a wall.  And this wall --the wall inside people’s minds-- is much more difficult to break down than a wall made of concrete...Before anything else, look for what you have in common with the other person and what you can agree about.  It’s a dialogue, not a war.  I don’t want to win or be right.  I just tell my own story.

     So enough, you say.  There's already enough "bad" news out there.  And I totally get it (a nice break from all of this is the "mostly" true story of Bank of Dave, a tale of a "commoner" wanting to form a bank to help his community, something England hasn't approved in 150 years).  But beyond the movies, this report from the London Review blog came out about Gaza: In the accounts coming out of the Gaza Strip, as well as evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, people tell of the persistence of a sense of community, of kindness and hospitality, of people sharing food, providing assistance and opening their doors to others: a solar-powered house with all the phones and laptops of the neighborhood being charged in the living-room; a five-seater car fleeing south with 21 people in it, many hanging out of the boot, stopping to pick up an old man walking and crying in the street; a hungry boy by the roadside with enough pride left to refuse a half-eaten biscuit.  One reader wrote into The Sun about a security guard at a high school named Vic, one who helped her and said, "I live well.  I have my garden at home, my wife and kids, I put food on the table.  I try to help where I can.  That's what life is really about.  Don't forget it."  Wrote the reader: I never forgot Vic's kindness or his words.  My education was all about competition, winning, and being the best.  Vic was the only person who ever told me it would be enough to live small, take care of people and the environment, and die anonymous to all except the people you'd touched with your kindness.

      Then this from the only Gen-Z'er in Congress, Maxwell Frost of Florida.  As he told Esquire: The joke is, you walk into the Capitol, look around, and you're like, "How did I get here?"  Then you spend a few months listening to some of your colleagues, and you're like, "How the hell did they get here?"  I think hope is good, but it's more than hope...I see the humanity in all my colleagues, even the ones that say some of the most disgusting things I've ever heard.  It doesn't mean I give them a pass for it.  Understanding their humanity actually helps me as an organizer -- helps understand the way forward...I know that we will be successful in this work because I know we're in it for the long haul.  I know we have the people on our side, and I know that time is on our side.  The next article after the interview had author Jeff Vandermeer noting: Damage is inherent in rewinding, in caring, but so too is rebirth, regrowth, repair.

Symbol: Japanese Academy

      In Japan there are people who are remnants of the war, a war that saw their world explode some 1600 feet above them as the first atomic bomb ignited the sky.  Some of them were actually quite close to the explosion and yet somehow survived, making it through the burns and horrors of the radiation sickness that would follow.  The daughter of one such survivor began photographing and recoding the thoughts of other survivors, what Japan calls "hibakusha."  Her piece in National Geographic said in part: Hibakusha is the Japanese term for “atomic bomb survivors”—but given the lasting damages of radiation exposure, it’s perhaps more accurately translated as “atomic bomb sufferers"...Knowing the horrors of atomic bombs, many hibakusha advocate for peace.  Their vision became partially realized on January 22, 2021, when the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was put into effect, but neither the U.S. nor Japan has ratified it.  What struck me about the photo-article was how similar their comments were to those Gen Z teens, as well as those in Gaza.  Explained one survivor, "Peace is our number one priority."  Said another, who passed away in 2019 at age 84, "It would be ideal if we could all cultivate in us the ability to dignify each other instead of getting upset over our differences."  Said an 86-year old survivor of the Hiroshima bombing (he passed away in 2018), "Life is a curious treasure.  We cannot continue to sacrifice precious lives to warfare.  All I can do is pray --earnestly, relentlessly-- for world peace."  Another article in the same issue had University of North Carolina social anthropologist Adam Johnson saying: Maybe we are beginning to realize that we need to radically rethink how we relate to the world and how we place ourselves in it.  As John Lennon chanted over 50 years ago, "All we are saying...is give peace a chance."

     So getting back to those two phrases again, about like it or not, and not really wanting to be together.  The older I get the more I think that while all of that may be true for those heavy elements of chemistry and of life's explosive beginnings, it may not be true for humanity.  We are not naturally in-human, or in-humane.  Rather we bond together because of what we have in common.  Sometimes governments or politicians or bankers or lawyers may cloud our eyes and pollute our vision; but once our sight clears we again see who we are, and who others are.  Orion closed their winter issue with a piece by best-selling author Ella Frances Sanders, writing about the French word ressentir, to "feel again": I would like personally to notice more snails.  And to feel again the kind of thunderstorms we do not have in Scotland, and the feeling of seeing an owl for the first time.  Also, sinking a hand into a barrel of dry rice or grain, colliding with quiet Spanish mountains half my life ago, learning to read, believing oneself to be physically safe in the world.  From early ages, we are routinely encouraged to sever ourselves from our feelings, to suspect them and explain them away, but we need to rejoin those countless, fractured pathways, the ones that do feel other people's feelings in an empathic sense, the paths that have long since been barricaded in an attempt to keep out the truths.  Many worry that if we allow ourselves to feel again in the most acutely animals ways, we would not survive, or stay held together; but the more fear I notice growing along the headlines and sidewalks around me, the more vital it seems that we feel again, and again, until a more beautiful world is made.   

     As this year draws to a close, may we all remember that no matter your religion, your race, your country, or your beliefs, there is a universal wish during the holidays: Peace on Earth.  Let us hope, and as Fujio Torikoshi so aptly put it earlier --hope earnestly and relentlessly-- that the coming year will indeed begin to bring us peace...for all of us, and for the planet as well.

*Shatz' somewhat lengthy article gives readers an extensive background of all that has led up to the ongoing occupation, and presents the views from both sides.  Worth a read if the conflict is proving polarizing or numbing to you...