An Open Letter to My Son on his Twenty-first Birthday

As I contemplate the arrival of your twenty-first birthday, I do so with enormous ambivalence. What I’m feeling is not merely the perennial, poignant agitation of a parent watching the maturation of a child and the accelerating passage of time, and disbelieving that it could all have happened so quickly. How could you get to be that tall, that independent, that competent, that complicated, that funny, that far away? How could over two decades have elapsed since that astonishing, magical afternoon at Marin General Hospital when you suddenly emerged, red-haired and disconcertingly serious of mien, thoroughly present and absolutely real? Like any first child, the culmination of such vast trepidations and expectations, the repository of such ineffable hope, the focus of so much speculation, concern and love.

What I’m feeling as I anticipate your symbolic transition to full adulthood (whatever that might mean!) is different – far beyond that self-indulgent parental miasma – and just minimally about Mom and me and only indirectly about you. Instead, it is societal and global, civilizational; it’s about the United States that we have so irresponsibly prepared for you and your generation, or not prepared; about the world that you will inevitably inherit and inhabit. How much more perilous and awful it feels than we expected it to and how much more culpable our nation and our culture and we ourselves are than we could ever have predicted or even imagined. So I’m writing to apologize, to say how terribly, terribly sorry I am. And how worried.

I was born, as you know just ten days before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, during the final several months of the American drive toward victory in World War Two, and I celebrated my own twenty-first birthday in the early spring of 1966, a moment, it seemed then, of unprecedented and nearly incalculable, (if largely oblivious, as it has turned out) optimism: a great time, my friends and I thought, to be crossing that threshold, and, frankly, especially to be doing it as a white, male American. Opportunities seemed virtually limitless and we knew for certain that the lives we were living and would live and the nation where we lived them were good and solid and true, sources of admiration, encouragement and aspiration for people everywhere.

Yes, there were already shadows — some of rather long standing, like usurpation and enslavement and exploitation; greed, injustice and mendacity. Some quite fresh like the startling assassination of President Kennedy my freshman year in college and the dying with him of what we still in 1965 construed as the dream of Camelot, the promise of the New Frontier. But Lyndon Johnson had surprised us, mounting the War on Poverty, establishing VISTA alongside the Peace Corps and engineering the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Richard Nixon was gone from public life and Barry Goldwater with his imperial recklessness had been soundly repudiated; the Senate counted 68 Democrats and only 32 Republicans, the largest plurality by either party since the Depression (and no one seemed concerned that fully one-third of the Democrats represented what had been Confederate States, where people were still dying on Freedom Marches). Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and would not be shot down in Memphis until 1968. Hardly any of us were chagrinned that my college class was only one percent black (the only people of color generally enumerated in those days) and that about as many of them were from Africa as from the United States.

International relations, to the extent that we paid much attention to the field, appeared to us secure and relatively serene. US-Soviet hostility was in some abeyance and there was an uneasy truce between Israel, still within its original 1948 borders, and the Arabs. The United States was gaining in the space race and working to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. American technology and know-how was rebuilding Europe and Japan and beginning to help the Third World to become more developed, more like us. True, there were 200,000 US troops in Vietnam in 1966 (and I was among a handful of anti-War protesters when President Johnson came to dedicate a building at my college in May) and more than one thousand Americans had already died there, but even with that, cocooned on campus with student draft deferments and rosy prospects, we were largely unconscious of the world in which we lived, as yet not quite willing to believe that our great and good nation could perpetrate a war of wrongful aggression. Foreign affairs, to the extent that the subject entered our mind, was largely covered by the popular paperback, Europe on Five (truly, Five!) Dollars a Day. When I traveled there for the first time a couple of years later, people in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and London treated me like a hero for winning World War Two and insisted on buying my drinks to thank me for winning, to thank me for being an American.

If anything, we were even more complacent about the human impact on nature and about what we were doing to ourselves. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1964 is widely credited as initiating the modern environmental movement. But, the first Earth Day was not until 1970 and the banning of DDT, which Carson had advocated, was not achieved until 1972. You know from my biomonitoring experience this summer that I still carry residual DDT in my own body more than thirty years later and am advocating for much stronger controls on many of the other 100,000 industrial chemicals synthesized during my lifetime. Recycling was not in my vocabulary when I was your age, and I remember that, as my mother managed paper drives at my school around that time, the truckloads of bundled newspapers were solely about funding for new library books; there was no mention of conserving trees. We were a little quicker with regard to cigarettes; the first bland warning on packages, “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health,” appeared the year I turned twenty-one, opposed by big agribusiness and many of those Southern Democratic Senators. Abortions were illegal in 1965, of course, and there were innumerable women traumatized (along with some men), butchered or killed as a result, and uncountable unwanted children.

So, maybe, some things are better, at least superficially, and for the moment. Class ceilings have been shattered in many sectors, closets burst asunder; white men don’t quite control all that they did then. Democracy is “on the move;” communism has been routed; there are billionaires in Russia and a tennis open this week in Beijing (perhaps to be won by an African American woman). There are reputed to be as many people living “middle class” lives in India as in the United States. “Everyone” is on the Internet and villages where people drink river water and cook over ox-dung are being wi-fied. A woman is poised to govern Germany. A New York Times pundit has proposed that the world is flat, that anybody can climb as high as anybody else.
Well, maybe. But, this week the US deaths in Iraq passed 1900 (twice the death-to-soldier ratio of Vietnam with a similar troop-count) and the Hurricane Katrina refugees in Texas are still waiting to go home. Global warming is a certainty and we’re running out of oil (which ought to be self-canceling, but probably won’t be). Osama bin Laden is unapprehended, Iran and North Korea, the neglected two-thirds of the “axis of evil” are virtually nuclear powers and Africa is a continent mired in corruption, disease, genocide and despair. The disparities between rich and poor Americans have never been greater and it was reported this week that for the first time since records have been kept, the average US family has a negative net worth. And, globally, the gap between the median income in rich nations and that in poor nations, nearly eighty-to-one, has never been higher. Worldwide, today, there are as many people living in persistent, dire and devastating poverty –- below two dollars a day per capita, less than half the cost of a full-on Starbuck’s frappuccino — as there were people altogether when I was your age. The two principal US exports are entertainment and munitions. Arguably, every American President elected since Jimmy Carter has perpetrated greater damage than his predecessor; unbelievably, some of us really do miss Nixon.

Last month, I heard a cosmologist state that 2005 was the worst year in the Cenozoic Period, the worst in the past sixty-five million. He really did. I’m not exactly sure what he meant, but I also found myself without a handy counter-argument. I wish I did have answers. I wish I even knew what the right questions could be. Two observations from literature come to mind. The first is Willie Loman’s wife Linda’s comment toward the end of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. (It seems to me that in some irreversible way, we are all salesmen now and everything is for sale.) “Attention must be paid,” Linda said. Maybe it’s representational rather than coincidental that Attention Deficit Disorder is the epidemic du jour of contemporary America. Looking back over the close to forty years since I was your age, inattention looms large as one of the causes of so much that didn’t turn out as we wish it had. Inattention mingled with self-centeredness and indolence. I remember, from the early days of environmentalism, a clever observation about discarding trash: “There is no away.” The older I get, the more persuaded I am that that’s true of just about everything.

The second literary source is W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” written to mark the Nazi invasion of Poland and famously resurrected four years ago at the time of the attacks on Manhattan and Washington. One of its less well-known, but pertinent, tropes is

“Mismanagement and grief / We must suffer them all again.” More familiar is the stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden evidently went back and forth about the connective in that last line ‘or’ vs. ‘and.’ I think there can be no doubt that both are true. And, that neither is easy. Maybe love and attention turn out to be versions of the same thing. And, certainly, the world suffers from a deficit of both. You joked when we talked about your being diagnosed with ADD that it wasn’t a deficit you had, it was a surplus. And I’m convinced that surplus is what is most needed now, needed before it really is too late. More and more of it.

Mom and I love you very very much. Welcome to “adulthood.” Use it wisely and well.