We have had a pretty long run going on 80 years. If you were born in the West you had to be pretty unlucky to end up in a place like the Vietnam war. The worst epidemic was AIDS which honestly you could avoid if careful. The diseases that in my childhood were death sentences are now routinely alleviated. In my lifetime absolute poverty was pretty well wiped out. Making a living was pretty easy by historical standards. I have never gone a day without food accept for fasting. I have gone very few days without a kind word from someone. I have never not sleep in a warm bed unless by choice. Numerous friends, a wife, few family problems. The most traumatic events were losing my parents and a sister. I had a career I liked and an education that by historical standards only the rich could afford. Through the magic of media I have been more places and seen more things than a few generations ago would have been impossible. I have been places in the world only the rich went when I was a kid. I have spent a lot of time outdoors isolated from the rest of the world in ways I don't think the next generation could. I have very few regrets.

It almost feels like the only way that things can go is down hill. Every generation has misgivings about the next but when you have had it so good it is perversely easy to be pessimistic. On the other hand no generation has had such a clear and constant reminder that it could all end tomorrow. Growing up under the threat of nuclear war the most obvious realistic dooms day. But we were also the most educated generation so we knew about plagues, civilizational collapse, war and famine, about catastrophic climate change and extinction. the dangers of chemicals in the environment, past life expectancy and genocides, and self inflicted horrors like drug addiction. Of all the things we knew could go wrong I think it is nuclear war that was the most formative.

The jokes about duck and cover are not all that much different than plague rhymes like ring around the posies. Most people my age don't realize how much we were effected by the constant barrage of warnings about nuclear war. Combined with demographics and the folly of massed youth it isn't surprising that mine was a generation of nihilism and narcissism. That pessimism has been contagious and it has made the following generation cynical. There is no more give peace a chance it's now something even more destructive than Utopian dreams. It's a world of victims with few actual victims. Almost as if some excuse had to be invented to justify withdrawal. The real problems just to difficult for people who were never inoculated with apple pie and baseball, the Fourth of July and Christmas.

You reap what you sow.

Prior to the sixties...apocalyptic warnings were relegated to those with a sidewalk sandwich board. Never believed any of the modern ones - the coming ice age, global warming, acid rain, the ozone hole, climate change, but our leaders seem to be getting pretty stupid and politics unpredictable so I am expecting some population culling.