During my visit this past weekend to visit family in Delaware -- and to see my new nephew Mr. C. for the first time (he's about 8 weeks old now), I reminisce about my own childhood.
Mr. E. is three years old; I was his age in 1966, a very different time. I was born before the first Surgeon General's report on smoking; my mother (and her family and contemporaries) all smoked -- before, during and after pregnancy.
The were few books parents turned to in those days and if you went into any home you were likely to find Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care; I don't know what to glean from that for my generation. Today there are hundreds of books, maybe thousands, with myriad ways to teach parents about raising children, a good number in conflict with one another. What kind of children come out of these various certainties about child care and rearing?
It was also a time where mom down here in the South (I am a Durham, NC native), let their kids out to play unsupervised -- without a fenced in yard, no less, when we were about 6 and up. My brother Tim and I (he's 5 years younger) used to go into the woods next to our house, which were quite dense, for hours at a time, go to little drainage ditches where there were tadpoles to catch, etc. If we explored past the end of the wooded area, there was a highway. Nevertheless, we'd come back home tired and hungry, but safe and sound.
I'm pretty sure few parents would do that nowadays.
I was also a latchkey kid. At 11-12, I came home to an empty house since my mom was working, and I usually started working on dinner and my homework. I was pretty left to my own devices, but the sense of independence was instilled in me because of need, not as an abstract concept.
Anyway, most kids like Mr. C and Mr. E will likely not have that experience of freedom to roam or be given that much responsibility. Perhaps the marker of that era of freedom ended with the publicity surrounding Etan Patz (1979)/Adam Walsh (1981) abduction cases. Parents then felt they had to keep their kids within eyeshot at all times, managed because of "the danger out there." And not a lot of kids feel it's possible to have that kind of freedom because they are told that danger lurks everywhere.
But does it? I guess my question is reality vs. perception. Has our society become more violent and amoral? Based on what I see on TV news, I cannot help but believe that some societal code has crumbled, but we've also created a culture of fear that surely escalates it. We have overcrowded prisons, many filled with sociopathic inmates, some with untreated mental illness, others there because of bias and socioeconomic despair. Were there fewer of these inmates back in the 1960s, or did adults just not hear enough about the problems of our criminal justice system? Were children being abducted and because there was no digitally connected network of law enforcement agencies that could find patterns of the criminal activity?
More below the fold.
On the bright side, the generation of Mr. C and Mr. E. will no doubtedly be more conscious about the environment - recycling is the norm, there are hybrid cars on the roads in abundance, municipal efforts to be green, etc. While there is constant pushback on the right to deny climate change, it has already been embedded into society's norms to try to do the right thing when it comes to simple principles of being better stewards of the planet.
Crude, rude, and cold strangers. Public displays of Southern hospitality still exist in large part due to, in some ways, a less-fast-paced environment. But that fades in places that have become more metropolitan (read: Yankee), with more transplants and the development of Research Triangle Park and the many companies that put roots down here. I certainly missed my Southern culture during my years in NYC (1976-1989). I loved the energy of NY and enjoyed my time at Stuyvesant HS (I miss Frank McCourt), but it was a bad time as a low-wealth kid to grow up in that cesspool of violence, crime (can you say NYC Blackout of 1977?) and literal filth in the city. The crime situation was so bad that crimes like chain and purse snatchings were ignored, and riding the subway at night was almost asking to be robbed or assaulted. I won't go into detail, but teen thugs with a hammer threatened me on one ride. I'm glad my head wasn't bashed in.
Thankfully the city is no longer like that, but it's still a place that still requires a bit of a hard shell and good coping mechanisms if you're an average person. NYC is a great place to live if you've got decent money in your pocket.
Race still matters. I do have to say that during my years in NYC I experienced personally and via daily news, that it is a very color-aroused place. When I lived there it was made quite clear to us that you better not find yourself in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst or Howard Beach at any time, day or night. The hostility toward blacks at that time wasn't your imagination - these were northern "Sundown Towns." People were killed, stomped to death for being "in the wrong place at the wrong time." Neighborhoods were definitely well-defined racially and ethnically.
Is it that way now? I can't attest to what has changed since I no longer live there, but my old neighborhood, Bed-Stuy, has undergone gentrification (due to the cost of living in Manhattan), and many young white families are regularly seen strolling down streets that were formerly filled in the 80s with crack dens, burnt-out brownstones etc., joining the middle class black population that continues renovating and living in the massive brownstones and houses in the historic district. That helps blur the culture lines to interact with diverse neighbors, always a good thing. After all, when my mother grew up in the same neighborhood in the 30s, Bed-Stuy was diverse - everyone was poor; it was the Great Depression.
But down South, moving back there in 1989 and through to today, the issue of race is still present in the politics of towns, but in general society I've not experienced any of the race-based hostility that I did in NYC. Most neighborhoods are not divided by race, so much as class, which explains the problems going on in the Wake County School system. The board's attempts to reconfigure the system for "neighborhood schools" has been viewed as a racist attempt by the (northern transplant) conservative board members to keep their precious white children away from the low-wealth black and brown kids. Honestly, I'm sure there are middle-class black and brown parents who would prefer the same.
The socioeconomic component of these moves cannot be ignored. If allowed to proceed, what will the effect be on children, the leaders of tomorrow, who only know other kids just like them?
And what about biracial and multiracial kids like Mr. E. and Mr. C? How will they be seen by their peers? Will race matter as much? Will our current limited thinking and biases about placing people in identifiable be passed along, continuing discrimination?
Politics. Sad to say, I don't see most of the political "reforms" playing themselves out as positives compared to when I was growing up, watching, say the Watergate Hearings. On the one hand, we still have pols on the take; on the other hand, we are electing more women to public office. Back then we had plenty of racial hypocrites on the ballot (Strom Thurmond to name one) as race matters took front and center stage; god knows the number of GOP sexual hypocrites have been outed as LGBT rights issues have taken flight.
The fact is that the next generation will continue to deal with bad legislation, politicians who will try to convince people to support policies against their own interests. Will it be just as challenging to get the next generation to be interested in public service, to aim high for principles over the almighty dollar? Even shooting lower, will we leave them a society that places a higher value on getting out to vote as a citizen's duty? We already know Americans basically tune out to state and local voting, and only wake up from their slumber during a Presidential election (if that). Surely we can do better in educating the next gen.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about this, but I wanted to launch this off to receive feedback from your perspective.