Did you know that our living generations are not the first to have resided on the planet? I can only imagine the lifestyles of the estimated 100 billion humans who preceded us. I can only imagine the billions who will follow us.
Great-great
Think of family members whom you might label “great-great.” They belong to not the last generation, not the one before that, but the one before great uncles, aunts, and great grandparents. Try to imagine their lives, their concerns. If you are 25 in 2023 with parents aged 50, you are removed from grandparents aged 75. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones whose still-living great grandparent is 100. Chances are almost nil that you have a still-living great-great grandparent at 125 years of age. As a twenty-five-year-old, you likely have parents who were born in the late sixties or early seventies; theirs, in the early to late forties; and theirs, in the first or second decade of the twentieth century. Just indulge me for a few more: The twenty-five-year-old in 2023 has a deceased great-great grandparent born in the nineteenth century before cars, planes, ubiquitous kitchens with refrigerators, paper towels, and plastic wrap. Your Great-great Grandma had parents and grandparents who knew life when outhouses outnumbered indoor bathrooms and salt and smoke were commonly used to preserve meat.
Lost in Their Unrecorded Lives
And save for the possible black-and-white picture without smiles common in selfies, nothing much tells you about the lives of anyone labeled “great-great.” You might even wonder why so many photos taken before 1900 depict such serious demeanors. Didn’t those people have any fun? Didn’t any photographer say, “Say cheeeeeese”?
I remember my maternal grandmother’s telling me about crossing the Atlantic. It was a time just before refrigeration became a necessary component of ocean liners. The passenger ship she took seems to have had an onboard slaughterhouse because she recalled sneaking away with her sister, both children wearing “clodhoppers,” running to see the “place where they slaughtered the cows at the back of the ship.” Definitely a different experience from a modern Norwegian or Carnival cruise ship: She made the voyage in the late nineteenth century—three times, once on her initial migration to America and then twice more as a young married woman on a visit to the homeland. No refrigerators? No problem. Fresh off the hoof was it. True, by the time the Titanic was built, refrigerated rooms cooled by machines the size of pickup trucks were incorporated into the aft decks of ocean liners built in the early twentieth century. But Grandma was already a young woman in 1912 when that ship hit ice, and she was already in the midst of giving birth to nine children (whose ages spanned a generation from oldest Michael to youngest Edward, five boys and four girls).
She crossed the Atlantic before Ford made the first Model T. She crossed before the Wright brothers made their historic flight. She crossed as Tesla and Edison fought their “current war” and probably when Tesla won that war by lighting the Chicago World’s Fair in 1895 with AC power. And she definitely seems to have crossed when home refrigeration systems were called ice boxes, essentially fancy cabinets with a galvanized metal liner and a compartment for a block of ice and a catchment tray underneath for the meltwater. Although some cargo vessels had air conditioning and even ice-making machines in the nineteenth century, the ship that ferried Grandma and her sister to America on that first trip during their childhood had no refrigerators that she could recall.
I can only imagine her life without refrigerators, even though I know I could visit many places today both in the United States and in all Third World countries where no one has a refrigerator. In fact, I have visited such a country where people live much as my own Great-great Grandma probably lived, and I am old enough to remember seeing some of those old ice boxes. There was an ice plant in the neighborhood of my pre-teen years. Cold building, that ice house. My cousins and I would ask the workers there for a piece of carbon dioxide ice—dry ice—then put it in a jar, tighten the lid, and wait until the sublimating ice built up enough gas pressure to make our little bomb explode on the sidewalk.
Are you now reliving a moment in my childhood? You were just there with me, watching and waiting, but not there. In my short and incomplete description, I could not take you “all the way back there,” just as my grandmother could not take me “all the way back there” to her life before she bore my mother.
Looking Back
What about my grandmother’s grandmother or great-great grandmother? Could anyone today resurrect those lives beyond superficial melodramatic or method acting like some Civil or Revolutionary War buff? Go to Williamsburg, Virginia. You’ll see people in “period dress.” They will tell you about life in colonial Williamsburg lived on the wide street leading to the Governor’s mansion. But what they describe isn’t the actual life that was. It’s the best re-creation that historians can give, BUT IT IS A STEREOTYPE OF THE TIMES. The details of actual lives are missing as evidenced by the re-enactors getting into their cars to drive home when the tourists return to their hotels. And the same goes for those Civil and Revolutionary War buffs, who temporarily live in costume and eat as the soldiers ate—eating, however, without the threat of botulism and salmonella and then driving home, stopping during their return at a highway rest stop with indoor plumbing and MacDonald’s with refrigerators. There are coolers carrying ice from their hotels in the trunks of their cars, a convenience unknown to Civil and Revolutionary War soldiers.
Unrelated but Related
On the drive from Asheville, NC, to the Ocoee River and the copper mining district, I passed by a “trading post,” essentially a gift shop with a re-enactor Cherokee. The trading post lies within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, the territory from which Jackson forced the indigenous tribe to move under the Indian Removal Act. Many died along the infamous Trail of Tears to their western exile. Let’s relive a fragment of the past. The re-enactor Cherokee at the trading post wears a fringed leather outfit and sports a feather headdress like the one that chiefs wore in many cowboy movies made during Hollywood’s early years stretching into TV’s early years.
Most tourists would think nothing of the feathered headdress the trading post Cherokee wears. But Cherokees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more commonly wore turbans. The past that we commonly know isn’t often the past that was. It’s a past of re-enactment, and it’s often stereotyped and rigidly fixed, bearing little actual resemblance to the specific realities of those denizens of ages gone by. Not far from the trading post is the casino; the life of a modern Cherokee differs greatly from the life of a long-gone Cherokee.
Looking Ahead
If you are 25 and are not, as so many of 2023’s young adults seem to be inclined, of the mindset that “I’m-never-bringing-kids-into-this-terrible-world” (as though there’s another), then a few of your descendants a century or two from now might wonder about the nature of your life. “What was great-great-great [heck, let’s add a few] great-great You like? How did You approach the problems of your times? What were Your concerns?” If your selfies survive magnetic deterioration and the organic inks in your color photos haven’t faded, those images will, short of your having left a detailed autobiography, be all that those great-great-great descendants will have. At least they will see that you smiled. In fact, every one of your contemporaries smiled. “What was going on with these old people? Were they really all very happy?” The selfies will preserve a stereotype of your times.
The Commonality
In 2023, the world’s population continues to stand on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the destruction that began when the US bombed Hiroshima and on the brink of destruction of lives lived with the luxury of refrigerators—so common they are even found in dorm rooms. It stands on the brink of life lived under the influence of Artificial Intelligence. It stands on the brink of evermore intrusive governmental authorities, evermore numerous pathological killers, and evermore pressures from would-be Caesars running gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments. The twenty-first century hasn’t changed much, however, from all things human. There were always such characters peopling the world; think Caligula and Nero; think Tamerlane and Hitler. All those human experiences and dangers have simply been placed in a new setting. Vices and virtues of the past remain.
Your descendants will differ only in their technology. They might, if the world goes nuclear holocaust, even have less than you. They might live in a time when refrigerators are uncommon and outhouses are common. But they will exhibit all the same vices and virtues you see about you in 2023.
If they have less because of what your generation decides, they might look back with envy and wonder. If they have more, they might still wonder, “What was Great-great-great You like? What concerned you?” They might have an old picture that makes them say, “This ancestor looks like my younger sister. This one looks like my Aunt Betty.”
If you want them to know more, send them a detailed message. Write your story.
Great-great
Think of family members whom you might label “great-great.” They belong to not the last generation, not the one before that, but the one before great uncles, aunts, and great grandparents. Try to imagine their lives, their concerns. If you are 25 in 2023 with parents aged 50, you are removed from grandparents aged 75. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones whose still-living great grandparent is 100. Chances are almost nil that you have a still-living great-great grandparent at 125 years of age. As a twenty-five-year-old, you likely have parents who were born in the late sixties or early seventies; theirs, in the early to late forties; and theirs, in the first or second decade of the twentieth century. Just indulge me for a few more: The twenty-five-year-old in 2023 has a deceased great-great grandparent born in the nineteenth century before cars, planes, ubiquitous kitchens with refrigerators, paper towels, and plastic wrap. Your Great-great Grandma had parents and grandparents who knew life when outhouses outnumbered indoor bathrooms and salt and smoke were commonly used to preserve meat.
Lost in Their Unrecorded Lives
And save for the possible black-and-white picture without smiles common in selfies, nothing much tells you about the lives of anyone labeled “great-great.” You might even wonder why so many photos taken before 1900 depict such serious demeanors. Didn’t those people have any fun? Didn’t any photographer say, “Say cheeeeeese”?
I remember my maternal grandmother’s telling me about crossing the Atlantic. It was a time just before refrigeration became a necessary component of ocean liners. The passenger ship she took seems to have had an onboard slaughterhouse because she recalled sneaking away with her sister, both children wearing “clodhoppers,” running to see the “place where they slaughtered the cows at the back of the ship.” Definitely a different experience from a modern Norwegian or Carnival cruise ship: She made the voyage in the late nineteenth century—three times, once on her initial migration to America and then twice more as a young married woman on a visit to the homeland. No refrigerators? No problem. Fresh off the hoof was it. True, by the time the Titanic was built, refrigerated rooms cooled by machines the size of pickup trucks were incorporated into the aft decks of ocean liners built in the early twentieth century. But Grandma was already a young woman in 1912 when that ship hit ice, and she was already in the midst of giving birth to nine children (whose ages spanned a generation from oldest Michael to youngest Edward, five boys and four girls).
She crossed the Atlantic before Ford made the first Model T. She crossed before the Wright brothers made their historic flight. She crossed as Tesla and Edison fought their “current war” and probably when Tesla won that war by lighting the Chicago World’s Fair in 1895 with AC power. And she definitely seems to have crossed when home refrigeration systems were called ice boxes, essentially fancy cabinets with a galvanized metal liner and a compartment for a block of ice and a catchment tray underneath for the meltwater. Although some cargo vessels had air conditioning and even ice-making machines in the nineteenth century, the ship that ferried Grandma and her sister to America on that first trip during their childhood had no refrigerators that she could recall.
I can only imagine her life without refrigerators, even though I know I could visit many places today both in the United States and in all Third World countries where no one has a refrigerator. In fact, I have visited such a country where people live much as my own Great-great Grandma probably lived, and I am old enough to remember seeing some of those old ice boxes. There was an ice plant in the neighborhood of my pre-teen years. Cold building, that ice house. My cousins and I would ask the workers there for a piece of carbon dioxide ice—dry ice—then put it in a jar, tighten the lid, and wait until the sublimating ice built up enough gas pressure to make our little bomb explode on the sidewalk.
Are you now reliving a moment in my childhood? You were just there with me, watching and waiting, but not there. In my short and incomplete description, I could not take you “all the way back there,” just as my grandmother could not take me “all the way back there” to her life before she bore my mother.
Looking Back
What about my grandmother’s grandmother or great-great grandmother? Could anyone today resurrect those lives beyond superficial melodramatic or method acting like some Civil or Revolutionary War buff? Go to Williamsburg, Virginia. You’ll see people in “period dress.” They will tell you about life in colonial Williamsburg lived on the wide street leading to the Governor’s mansion. But what they describe isn’t the actual life that was. It’s the best re-creation that historians can give, BUT IT IS A STEREOTYPE OF THE TIMES. The details of actual lives are missing as evidenced by the re-enactors getting into their cars to drive home when the tourists return to their hotels. And the same goes for those Civil and Revolutionary War buffs, who temporarily live in costume and eat as the soldiers ate—eating, however, without the threat of botulism and salmonella and then driving home, stopping during their return at a highway rest stop with indoor plumbing and MacDonald’s with refrigerators. There are coolers carrying ice from their hotels in the trunks of their cars, a convenience unknown to Civil and Revolutionary War soldiers.
Unrelated but Related
On the drive from Asheville, NC, to the Ocoee River and the copper mining district, I passed by a “trading post,” essentially a gift shop with a re-enactor Cherokee. The trading post lies within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, the territory from which Jackson forced the indigenous tribe to move under the Indian Removal Act. Many died along the infamous Trail of Tears to their western exile. Let’s relive a fragment of the past. The re-enactor Cherokee at the trading post wears a fringed leather outfit and sports a feather headdress like the one that chiefs wore in many cowboy movies made during Hollywood’s early years stretching into TV’s early years.
Most tourists would think nothing of the feathered headdress the trading post Cherokee wears. But Cherokees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more commonly wore turbans. The past that we commonly know isn’t often the past that was. It’s a past of re-enactment, and it’s often stereotyped and rigidly fixed, bearing little actual resemblance to the specific realities of those denizens of ages gone by. Not far from the trading post is the casino; the life of a modern Cherokee differs greatly from the life of a long-gone Cherokee.
Looking Ahead
If you are 25 and are not, as so many of 2023’s young adults seem to be inclined, of the mindset that “I’m-never-bringing-kids-into-this-terrible-world” (as though there’s another), then a few of your descendants a century or two from now might wonder about the nature of your life. “What was great-great-great [heck, let’s add a few] great-great You like? How did You approach the problems of your times? What were Your concerns?” If your selfies survive magnetic deterioration and the organic inks in your color photos haven’t faded, those images will, short of your having left a detailed autobiography, be all that those great-great-great descendants will have. At least they will see that you smiled. In fact, every one of your contemporaries smiled. “What was going on with these old people? Were they really all very happy?” The selfies will preserve a stereotype of your times.
The Commonality
In 2023, the world’s population continues to stand on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the destruction that began when the US bombed Hiroshima and on the brink of destruction of lives lived with the luxury of refrigerators—so common they are even found in dorm rooms. It stands on the brink of life lived under the influence of Artificial Intelligence. It stands on the brink of evermore intrusive governmental authorities, evermore numerous pathological killers, and evermore pressures from would-be Caesars running gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments. The twenty-first century hasn’t changed much, however, from all things human. There were always such characters peopling the world; think Caligula and Nero; think Tamerlane and Hitler. All those human experiences and dangers have simply been placed in a new setting. Vices and virtues of the past remain.
Your descendants will differ only in their technology. They might, if the world goes nuclear holocaust, even have less than you. They might live in a time when refrigerators are uncommon and outhouses are common. But they will exhibit all the same vices and virtues you see about you in 2023.
If they have less because of what your generation decides, they might look back with envy and wonder. If they have more, they might still wonder, “What was Great-great-great You like? What concerned you?” They might have an old picture that makes them say, “This ancestor looks like my younger sister. This one looks like my Aunt Betty.”
If you want them to know more, send them a detailed message. Write your story.
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