There is a long note that has been circulating online. It has different versions, having reincarnated from a defense to a nostalgic recollection of what type of generations have brought about the present dispensation.
I have ignored it for a while in the same way I would turn away quickly from chain letters. This document I am talking about has the feel of that kind of message passed around as if the act of it being read or touched will make an impact on one’s destiny. But, as with any of these messages floating like some celestial intellectual debris in the milky way galaxy of our big bang existence, that message is bound to be caught by a friend.
Thus, one day, in our small chat room, comes this heading from dear friend, Lulu C.: THOUGHT I’LL SHARE THIS.
The first sentence to arrive is almost a preamble: This is about the seniors in this group we should be proud of…
Good opening. The thought about being a senior citizen has always been presented either in a smart-alecky way, which is not a good air to put on when one is old-er. Or, parsed in a smug way, the smugness passing off as a matured (take note of the past tense) template of coolness.
But the note declares our period as the “Best era ever!” Why not! Why not indeed.
The wit of the missive follows: Born in the 40s/50s. Grew up in the 60s. Educated in the 70s. Ventured out in the 80s. Messed around in the 90s. Stabilized a bit in the 2000s. Got a bit wiser in 2010s.
I look at that procession of ages and think if I need to follow them in that sequence. Sad. Rigid. Then I realize that while the specific ages cannot be juggled here and there, they can be appropriated depending on one’s level of maturity, sense of decency, and wildness quotient.
More articulations follow—we have been, at this point, through eight different decades, two different centuries, and two different millennia. That is not only breathtaking; those years must have taken the breath from thousands of people.
Looking back at those years: If we were artistic forms, we would have evolved already from figurative to abstract. If we were cinema, we would have gone from black and white to Technicolor or Eastman. And, if we were TV sets, we would be active participants of the transition from boob-tube to smart TV.
Our generations lived through lines of communications that had us rooted to the ground: when you responded to a phone call, the person at the other end of the line knew where you were. When our generations shifted to mobile phone, we did not only become mobile, we and our calls could not be placed anymore in any point in geography unless you allowed the device to track your whereabouts. But who would do that?
We had only one kind of film in our lifetime or so we thought until technologies allowed narratives to be streamed. Our youth was marked by moviehouses, those imperial structures that pretended to be palaces of pleasures until they were given away by popcorns and soda.
We understood the meaning of values even if we did not consider as significant those actions our societies upheld as sterling; we discussed vociferously notions of good manners and right conduct and yet we spent a greater part of our growing up breaking rules, breaching barriers we felt limited our grasp of pure freedom.
As early as the age of 40 and up to the golden anniversary of our human existence, we slowly lost our graceful penmanship. This was followed by that word—penmanship—going extinct. Except for the signatures that we kept intact, many things about us began to bend to the law of gravity. There were more trips to certain offices that always asked, politely most of the time, if we had altered our official signature. No worries, our generations would soon confront the age of e-signatures, of e-commerce, of e-medical consultation, and even e-wakes and e-burials.
The greatest upheaval arrived via e-mails, which caused us to stop writing with pens or fountain pens. Another generation would give ours a puzzled look when we fastidiously differentiated between ballpoint pens and sign pens. Then letters altogether stopped because for us e-mails are not letters.
Letters are those written on special sheet of paper, which are then placed in envelopes, sealed and delivered. The trips to the Post Office, a mark of well-placed ladies and gentlemen, came almost to a full stop.
My utmost concern when I felt I could not stop anymore from reaching beyond the age of 50 was that I pitied our generations—those born in the 50s and grew to senior years in the 2010s—because we never had the rare encounter with a world war. Surprised by my bravado, I felt I was deprived of a first-class world-class angst. Or a chance to develop personal anguish and make it into an intellectual code.
But, looking back at that document, the same material that propelled me to write braggadocio in this essay, I see this line toward the end: Made it to… 2020.
We did not only make it to that year; we made it to the age of lockdown, to the era when the entire world—not a single nation nor an isolated village—had to grapple with a first-class, world-class, global pandemic.
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