Thirty years ago, when I turned twenty-three, I was in something of an in-between time. I’d finished college, but I wasn’t working full time. I took a couple of classes that spring 1996 semester because I could: I was working as a waiter and getting mostly night shifts, so I had the days fairly free. But I was beginning to prepare for my coming adventure: in June, I left for Poland the first time, and while I didn’t know exactly where I was heading in January of 96, I knew I was going somewhere.
Now, thirty years later, back in the States for twenty years, our own daughter is starting college and our son is about to start high school. All the questions ranging about my thoughts in 1996 — Where will I land? What will life be like there? Will I find some form of fulfillment there? — have found their answers and raised more questions, in turn answered with still more posed. Many of those questions have reformed now with different subjects: Where will L land? Were the Boy? Will she find there the fulfillment she seeks? Will he?
The transformations in the world too play their own role in these questions. Thirty years ago, the Iron Curtain was history with the Soviet Union itself history and with it the Cold War. There was a certain worldwide optimism, I think, that things might actually improve, that the threat of worldwide annihilation might be a thing of the past. Now, a resurgent totalitarian Russia threatens European peace, an increasingly bold China eyes Taiwan and considers, and the current administration is doing its damnedest to turn the US into a full-on fundamentalist-Christian fascist theocracy. That hopeful future gave way to an increasingly uncertain and worrisome present with new worries like the overall negative effects of AI (will it defeat us by initially dumbing us down even further or by gaining consciousness and taking over?) and ever-worsening (in part, due to the massive energy demands of AI) global warming. It’s a real challenge to find much optimism for our children’s future, to feel there’s much of a chance that their lives will be better than ours–all parents’ hope.