A four generation perspective on living in the United States

I am now living into my fourth generation. When I was born in 1931, Herbert Hoover was still President of the United States.  I grew up in New York City during the Great Depression when a subway ride or a hot dog at Nedick’s was five cents. During World War II in public school I collected tin foil, rubber bands, and newspapers for the war effort. My second generation began with the birth of the United Nations and the start of the Cold War. It led in turn to a wave of hysteria about Communist influence on American life.  The witch hunt for current and former Communists made me nervous.  My oldest brother quit the Communist Party when the Lysenko Controversy erupted. As an undergraduate at NYU, I associated with fellow students of the Beat Generation. I left New York for Indiana University and learned to be a geneticist. Some of my high school classmates were killed in the Korean War. My second generation came to a close at UCLA where I witnessed the first Peace Corps volunteers and students who registered African American voters in Mississippi.  Our children formed the Baby Boom generation. The 60’s were transforming and I shifted my emphasis to teaching non-majors biology courses. My third generation was mostly lived while teaching at Stony Brook University on Long Island in New York State. It was an age of greed, the pursuit of wealth, the tearing down of the New Deal that Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson had built. We became the world’s policeman or bully depending on your politics. We became a nation of winners and losers, makers and takers, patriots or subversives.  There was no middle ground and the middle class was disappearing.  My fourth generation began as we entered the twenty-first century.  I retired. I shifted to full time writing.  We moved to Indiana to enjoy its university setting and opportunities to enjoy its theater, libraries, music performances, and ease of access and cost. After 9/11 and the endless wars of a nation engorged with armaments waiting to be used, we are still trying to define ourselves.  We can smash armies that are well armed but we are stymied by terrorists, guerrillas who melt into the jungles, and an amorphous enemy of uncertain size, location, and objectives, partly created by our own failed international policies which reflect our own domestic shift towards a plutocracy dictating legislation favoring the wealthy. The two iconic images of these four generations are the bombing of Pearl Harbor that inspired what some call “the greatest generation” in our fight against fascism and 9/11 which sadly inspired fear, lashing out at the wrong enemies, the loss of privacy, the shift to the perpetual military state, the crushing of labor unions, the demeaning of liberals, the rejection of science, and a contempt for teachers and scholars.  

HUMANS ARE NOT INNATELY AGGRESSIVE NOR IS WAR INEVITABLE BECAUSE OF OUR GENES

 

I never felt comfortable with the claim that humans are innately aggressive and wars are inevitable because of our genes (or if we are male warriors, because of our testosterone). The evidence for genes for war or that testosterone is what makes us fight wars is a “pull out of the air” belief, not something backed with mappable genes. It is certainly not something a molecular biologist could presently identify through gene products and target cells in the brain with innate circuits activated.  Without that type of evidence why put other people’s lives at risk because it is a comfortable belief?  I believe we learn to hate just as we learn to be bigots based on religion, nationality, race or sex. Is there a gene for being a slave master?  Is there a gene for making us homophobic?  Is there a gene for exploiting others?  Is there a gene for greed?  I doubt these cop-outs that avoid thinking about the causes of our discontents and passing them off to biology.  My field does not need that type of endorsement.  It’s just as damaging as the 1930s when genes were used by bigots to justify compulsory sterilization of so-called unfit people in the United States or to justify racial hygiene, especially as Nazi ideologists identified their racial hygiene movement.

There are times in our history when we had alternative thoughts about our values.  I think of the GI Bill that put hundreds of thousands of veterans to college free and as a result gave us the greatest rise in middle class in the twentieth century.  I think of the efforts to establish a Peace Corps whose job was to help needy people around the world build their homes, develop irrigation, create efficient cooking facilities, educate children, and establish public health efforts so they could have more food, a cleaner life with less infectious diseases, newspapers they could read, and roads they could travel.  The same was true for Vista which attempted to remedy many of the problems of those living in poverty or slums in the United States.  I think of the national effort to build the interstate highways which have linked our cities from coast to coast.  I think of the WPA during the Great Depression that provided great public works – bridges, airports, buildings, and provided murals, theatre groups, and parks for communities that lacked a tax base to raise money for them. 

We have largely replaced those values with a gospel of greed, indifference to others, self-interest, a belief that social failure is personal failure, a belief that helping others subsidizes laziness and stupidity, that a government’s role should be limited almost entirely to building a huge military, fighting wars that protect economic interests, regulating the bedroom and defeating efforts to organize labor, eliminating minimum wages or cost of living programs, eliminating health insurance by government, and breaking up public school systems to foster religious based or privileged based schooling.  At the same time the wealthiest are allowed unlimited influence on their legislatures, including opportunities to support candidates with huge sums of cash, gerrymander districts to limit the democratic process, and provide generous subsidies for the rich and a look the other way policy if the rich stash their money in foreign banks and shift their factories to developing nations where labor costs are far below US poverty levels. 

I call such efforts a trend to establishing a plutocracy of the wealthy for the wealthy. It is not an America at its idealistic best.  Why have we abandoned the Monroe Doctrine which tried to keep us from involving ourselves in foreign wars?  Why have we engaged in virtually perpetual war since the end of WWII?  Are the only two forms of government we can imagine being that of a choice of  a plutocracy of uncaring wealthy rulers or a communist type state that stifles individual freedom to criticize one’s government?  Is there no place for a representative government where the middle class and the poor have a voice and can favor peace over war?