At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the U.S. created training materials for school children to protect themselves in case of a nuclear explosion. Many older adults recall crouching under their desks, or in interior corridors, and tucking their heads under their arms for practice.

My school didn’t hold “duck and cover” drills. What enemy would waste nuclear weapons on Morgantown, West Virginia? However, I remember lining up in the playground for military-style metal “dog tags” embossed with name, religion, and probably more. We were to wear them on a chain around the neck, so our bombed bodies could be identified and given an appropriate burial.

The Soviet bomb didn’t fall, the Cold War ended, and today school children learn self-protection through active shooter drills instead. Déjà vu all over again? Two differences stand out. First, school shootings aren’t merely possible but occur at an alarming rate. An individual child’s risk is low, but one dead child is one too many. Second, the source of potential danger is no longer overseas but in our home neighborhoods. In the words of Walt Kelly’s cartoon possum Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Active shooter drills are controversial. Some children say preparation boosts their confidence. Others experience anxiety to the point of PTSD, especially if a drill comes unannounced and mimics a real shooting. Best would be to end school shootings in the first place. Common-sense laws to bar access to firearms except for recreation, hunting, or self-defense? Stronger mental health systems for youth? Ample funding for nonpartisan scientific research into gun violence and the effectiveness of current state-level preventive strategies would be a good place to start.

Image: The U.S. produced the pamphlet Duck and Cover in 1951. A film version followed the next year.

Crunch! Grind! Surely something is wrong with the car.

Five majestic oaks line our long Wisconsin driveway. I love the trees and the wildlife they support. Each September, though, they carpet the drive with the loose organic gravel Winnie-the-Pooh called  “haycorns.” I take out the leaf blower with the rechargeable battery to clear acorns from the asphalt. At first it is fun. The battery runs down and I take a break. After it charges, I blow some more. An acorn falls on my head. By the second recharge, the fun is wearing off. My charge has run down too.

Like most things in life, it’s a trade-off. We always have choices, even if we don’t have the choice we’d prefer. Reframing “have to” as “choose to” gives me a sense of agency, even if the outcome is the same. I could cut down the oaks or leave the drive too bumpy for comfort. I’m not required to blow the acorns aside. I enjoy the freedom to choose this task over the alternatives.

There isn’t always one clear best choice. Socrates drank hemlock rather than hide his opinions, Galileo recanted rather than face torture for heresy, and I don’t respect either man the less. Other cases are more mundane. I wasn’t forced to cancel the picnic because of rain; I decided to. I didn’t have to stay home sick; I chose that over the risk of infecting others. It boosts my resilience to treat myself as an actor in my own life instead of a mere victim of circumstance or fate.

Blaming the younger generation is nothing new. “They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it,” Aristotle wrote in ancient Greece. But naming distinct generations is a novelty. Credited to Gertrude Stein, it began with more sympathy than blame. “All of you young people who served in the war . . . You are all a lost generation,” Stein told Ernest Hemingway to describe the cynicism and disillusion of the 1920s.

Shared historical experiences give any generation a distinct consciousness, Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannhein wrote in 1923. Each cohort who grew up during wars, depression, the baby boom, rapid technological change, or the Covid pandemic shared a different life experience. Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation (1998) honored the men and women who fought in the Second World War and labored on the home front.

Next came the more traditional, conformist generation of the 1950s. After a childhood of depression and war, they craved quiet family life with economic security. An article in Time Magazine in 1951 stated, “The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence.” A high birth rate (baby boom) in families of the silent generation gave rise to a large, rebellious cohort of young adults in the 1960s. They weren’t called boomers till long after the fact.

The slightly bizarre practice of naming and dating every generation is largely a 21st century phenomenon. Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) unintentionally popularized a title for his own cohort, born after the baby boom. The theory of archetypal cycles in Neil Howe’s and William Strauss’s Generations (1991) didn’t catch on, but their term millennials did, meaning those who would come of age around the year 2000.

Classing individuals by year of birth (listed here) risks stereotyping. It also offers a shorthand for real differences, like the job security of the boomers vs. the social media of the millennials. It has become so entrenched that we now name a cohort before it takes form. Instead of “lost,” “great,” or “silent,” after millennials came the placeholder Generations Z and Alpha. Our only certainty about Gen Beta, present-day infants, is that they will think they know everything, and will always be quite sure about it.

Image: Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash.

Fresh-picked vegetables fill the grocery bins to overflowing. Ragweed pollen sets my nose running nonstop. Here we are again, welcoming meteorological autumn, while the astronomical calendar says we’re in the last gasp of summer. Diminishing daylight is predictable to the minute. Plants ripen on their own terms when they’re ready.

As a historian, I tend to think in terms of linear time. Things happen from first to second to third, from beginning to end. The past never recurs exactly; context always changes. On the other hand, it’s said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. While I grew irreversibly from child to teen to college student and beyond, my girlhood summers ended with the start of school, year after year without fail. All time is both linear and cyclical.

For me, current events force the issue. Linear time isn’t the same as progress. I’m grateful for medical advances that keep me alive and technologies that keep me in touch with family far away. But the state of democracy, climate, and the war-torn world can make me question whether the long arc of the universe truly bends toward justice. At these moments, shifting to a cyclical perspective eases my spirit. Day will follow night. Spring will follow winter. And  one of these weeks, frost will shut down the ragweed until next year.
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Image: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

“Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumbling down.” To Blacks in the antebellum American South, the song is said to have celebrated hope the walls of slavery would crumble. To Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, the fall of Jericho is part of the ancient tale of their ancestors’ return to the Promised Land.

One group’s protective enclosure is another group’s prison. Who over age fifty or sixty doesn’t remember watching footage of East Germans in 1989 tearing down the Berlin Wall, free at last to escape its confines? My memory of visiting that wall much earlier features a dead zone on both sides, with graffiti and decrepit buildings along the west side and pristine, empty streets to the east.

By contrast, medieval city and castle walls were built to protect the people and buildings inside. Many have crumbled long since. Heavy cannons, aircraft, and bombs made their military use obsolete.

The Great Wall of China, the Long Walls of Athens, the Great Zimbabwe, and hundreds of lesser walls are vital to world history. That’s unlikely to end soon. A partially finished wall along the United States border with Mexico aims to stem the flow of dangerous weapons, drugs, and people into the U.S. Migrants trapped south of the wall may return to the political or gang violence they were trying to escape. In 2021, Israel completed construction of a “smart fence” around Gaza equipped with sensors, cameras, and remote weapon systems, to shield southern Israelis from terrorism. People trapped inside Gaza are dying from bombs and starvation.
Protection or prison? It depends on your point of view.

Image: Raphael and workshop, The Fall of Jericho, 1518. Fresco, Loggia of Pope Leo X, Pontifical Palace, Vatican.