STOP SCARING THE CHILDREN
Then there is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the 29-year-old voice of the millennials in Congress, whose message is that the baby boomers have ruined the planet for her generation. She says we have 10 years left to head off planetary destruction. We have apparently returned full circle to the early days of humankind when life on Earth was described by Hobbes as “nasty, brutish, and short.” The only difference is that even the Neanderthals had more than 8 1/2 years of survival in front of them. Of course, there are major challenges for the younger generations, as there have been in every age since man appeared on the planet. My parents had to overcome polio, the Great Depression, and Nazi Germany. When I was a kid, we had to practice bomb drills in school because of fear of Soviets dropping nuclear bombs that would wipe out whole cities. But to fill the young with false fears of “mass extinction” and so on is to ignore the true state of the planet. It isn’t dying. The young should be celebrating what every objective measure shows: They are living at the greatest moment in the history of the globe. For those under the age of 30, listen up: You will live longer, healthier lives with more material wealth than any previous generation. You will inherit a world with less poverty, less disease, more leisure time, less pollution, less discrimination, and more opportunity to achieve your dreams and aspirations than any other generation – except for your children’s and grandchildren’s.
You are not inheriting a severely injured planet but one in which a storehouse of thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge makes you capable of combatting almost any conceivable problem or catastrophe. The whole history of modern times is for human ingenuity, innovation, and technological know-how to combat the challenges that mankind confronts. If you think global warming is a challenge, thank God you don’t have to deal with smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, polio, or the plague. The Black Death in Europe killed about 1 of every 4 residents. Now, that is an apocalypse. What the young lack today is perspective. AOC thinks she has problems? It wasn’t so long ago that as many as 1 in 10 women died while giving birth. I always marvel that the “woe is me” refrain from the young today is often recited as they tap on their $600 iPhones (charged with the electric power they want to do away with) and they carry around their caramel lattes from Starbucks. I tell my kids that without brainpower to deal with catastrophes than any previous generation since the dawn of time. What we do know is that as we grow richer and wiser, we will be better equipped with the resources and the
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November 2019
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