Are We the Luckiest Generation?
We spend a lot of time lately and rightly worrying about the challenges and horrors of our day: climate change, war, pandemics, the rise of fascism worldwide, etc. It is certainly difficult to see progress through the miasma of such modern horrors, but it is there.
As a generation we have witnessed considerable progress—progress sometimes at a cost, progress sometimes woefully inadequate, progress usually inequitably distributed, progress not without some backsliding—but progress nonetheless.
Our generation, born between World War II and Woodstock, has lived through a period of major, perhaps unprecedented, growth in the economy and of similarly substantial improvements in medicine and life expectancy, in living standards and physical comforts, in transportation and, of course, in technology.
We experienced considerable improvements, as well, in civil rights and in sexual and cultural freedom. We even witnessed, globally in particular, a major, though still woefully incomplete, reduction in extreme poverty.
The purpose of the chronological list that follows is certainly not to justify any lack of vigilance on the dangers we face or any lapse in commitment to righting the wrongs we continue to see around us. But if we don’t acknowledge ways in which things have gotten somewhat better, ways in which we have indeed been lucky, we risk losing the will to make them better still.
I approach all this—tentatively, incompletely—through the question of whether we might qualify, on balance, as the luckiest generation.
First a few crucial caveats:
No, we were not the luckiest generation if you were gay, lesbian or bi or trans and likely had to spend decades of your life at least in part in a closet, having to struggle to openly love the people you loved and be the person you were. And, perhaps most terribly, if you or your friends were among the many of our generation who died from AIDS.
No, you were not lucky if you were a person with a disability in the decades when so many places were not accessible to you.
No, this generation was not lucky if you were female and therefore were, for example, likely to be responsible for most of the childrearing and housework, or maybe a career limited to “women’s jobs”: secretary, nurse, school teacher.
No, not if you were black or otherwise “of color” and continued to face—while the Civil Rights movement was still getting going—discrimination in housing, employment and many, if not most, other aspects of life.
Ours was the generation that had the great privilege of seeing many such injustices rectified. But it took much, much too long.
And, no, you were not lucky if you were born into poverty, in the United States or elsewhere in the world. The huge imbalance of wealth on this planet has not been rectified. In some ways it has gotten worse.
That said— that acknowledged, those injustices never to be forgotten—many of us post-war babies in the United States have had some continued good fortune, which, in the end, was not limited to straight, white males.
The first birth control pill.
Life expectancy in the United States in 1950 was 65.6 years for a man, and 71.1 for a woman. It has steadily expanded during our lifetime.
We Americans born after World War II arrived in time for perhaps the greatest continuous economic boom the world has ever seen. The United States economy grew steadily from the early 1950s through the early 1970s, and has grown mostly steadily—with a few recessions (and a particularly severe one in 2008) but no depression—for most of our lives.
In 1920, almost 2 percent of children born in the United States died before they reached five years old. By 1950 the death rate for children under five had fallen to .4 percent.
The first rock ‘n’ roll record—"Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, Ike Turner’s band—was recorded in 1951. We were born into an era of music that would be more powerful rhythmically, more honest sexually and, eventually, more aggressive politically and perhaps more ambitious poetically than just about any music that had come before.
There have been many wars after the Korean War ended in 1953, but no war in which the world’s major powers bombed or fired upon each other.
Polio mostly paralyzed or killed children, but a polio vaccine arrived in 1955, when most of us would otherwise have been vulnerable to this awful virus.
By 1955, half of American homes had a television set. Top level entertainment had previously been available only in big cities or in movie theaters or on the radio. Now comedy, drama and the Howdy Doody show were available in homes all over the country.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I.
In 1958, in the United States, Boeing introduced its 707, the first largely successful jet passenger plane. Jet planes could transport more people significantly further and faster than the old propeller driven planes. But the spread of airplane travel would prove another setback for the planet’s environment.
The percentage of American families able to own their own home increased from 44 to 62 percent between 1940 and 1960. (Alas, that percentage has only gone up 6 percent since 1960.)
By the 1960s, most new homes in the United States were built with air conditioning (at some cost to the environment.)
The first birth control pill, Enovid, became available on May 11, 1960. Within two years, 1.2 million American women were using the pill.
On April 1, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first human into space. Yuri Gagarin circled the earth one time.
Telestar I, a communications satellite launched in 1962, made possible live broadcast of television images between Europe and the United States. Eventually, entertainments, information and communications would be able to travel almost instantly among countries and continents.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned labor discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned prejudicial voting regulations.
In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut the Supreme Court case ruled that married couples have a right to privacy, which made state laws that banned contraceptive use by married couples unconstitutional.
A chemistry student known as Owsley, set up an LSD lab in San Francisco in the mid-1960s.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, was signed into law a week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. It banned discrimination in housing.
On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set food upon another celestial body.
By 1970, 80 percent of American families had automobiles. Ground travel was no longer confined to trips into or out of a central railroad station. The environment suffered considerably, however.
Congress passed the landmark Clean Air Act in 1970, which gave the newly-formed Environment Protection Agency the legal authority to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation. Global warming proceeded apace, however. And the Supreme Court has since limited the EPA’s ability to act.
In 1977 Steve Wozniak, a regular participant in the Bay Area’s Homebrew Computer Club, and Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II, by some definitions the world’s first successful personal computer.
The World Wide Web computer protocol—which allowed computers around the world to share information—was invented by the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and made available to the public in 1991. Information, limited for much of the history of humankind by geographic proximity to a bustling city or a comprehensive library, would, in the next century, become available to anyone with access to computer
On July 26, 1990, President George G. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the world's first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities.
In 1995, a new class of antiretroviral drugs called protease inhibitors became available, and, thanks to “cocktails” of these drugs, by 1996 AIDS was no longer the leading cause of death for young American adults. It became a disease with which you could live a comfortable life.
By 1995 leaded gasoline was fully prohibited in the United States. As a result, levels of lead in the air decreased by 94 percent between 1980 and 1999.
In 1998 the FDA approved Viagra, an oral medication to treat impotence.
From 1980 through 2000, the age-adjusted death rate for coronary heart disease fell from 542.9 to 266.8 deaths per 100,000 population among men and from 263.3 to 134.4 deaths per 100,000 population among women.
In 2001 in the Netherlands, same sex marriages became, for the first time anywhere, legal.
The first legally sanctioned gay marriage ceremony in the United States took place in San Francisco in 2004.
Steve Jobs and Apple released the original iPhone on June 29, 2007. Subsequent improved models of the iPhone and of competing and less expensive portable phones would make it possible for people, just about wherever they happened to be, to communicate with each other and, soon enough, to access entertainment and information from just about anywhere in the world.
In 2012 Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Recreational use of marijuana was legal in 14 states by 2020.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalized it in all 50 states, and required states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriage licenses.
Between 2000 and 2019, the rate of new cancer cases per 100,000 people declined by 5.4%, while the annual mortality rate fell by more than 26 percent.
In 2019, 9.2 percent of the world’s population that lived in extreme poverty. That number had been 36 percent about 30 years early.
Life expectancy at birth in the United States in 2022 for men was 74.8 years for men and 80.2 years for women. Men and women are now expected to live almost a decade longer that we were expected to live in 1950.
Life expectancy in the United States.
Injustices and unfairness—between countries, within countries—are rife and show no sign of declining. Democracy is no longer growing in the world. Indeed, it appears to be shrinking. Tragedy, illness and premature death, is omnipresent and continues to be distributed inequitably. The poor in almost any context suffer more than the rich.
The many comforts and conveniences to which we have become addicted—including, in particular, automobiles and airplanes and air conditioning—have contributed to a mammoth new problem: global warming, which we have left, shamefully, for the generations that follow ours.
But have we not cleaned up some of the worst despoilments of the environment? Have we not helped make the world somewhat more comfortable, less violent, more tolerant. And have we not, as a generation—overall, in the end, with exceptions—been lucky?