One Thing or Another: The Kids Are Not All Right

It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …

Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.

That began to change a couple years ago. I don’t know why. Maybe I started to see what I’d considered the dismissal of our lives for the existential threat it really was. If others found our experiences from the 1980s and 1990s irrelevant, there was the infuriating possibility that they were. Look at our pain! I wanted to shout. Look at the photographs of skeletal men on the AIDS ward at Kaiser Sunset! See how we and died and brought meaning to tragedy!

But now it is evident America’s youth have their own tragedies. One young woman referred to herself and her peers as “the mass shooting generation.” I learned recently (speaking of not paying attention to the lives of others … ahem), that schoolchildren regularly endure “active shooter drills” in their classrooms. Active shooter drills. When I was a small child in school we had drills for atomic bombs, learning to march single file outside the building. Bomb shelter signs were a familiar sight. But practicing what to do when a man or boy shows up with a rapid-fire assault weapon or a handgun and starts firing rounds into the bodies of his fellow students? Imagine that, AIDS generation.

Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns as if, at the age of sixteen, they are incapable of wanting to survive and live in a world that doesn’t threaten them at every turn.

I’ve made my peace with being in a final phase of life. I believe I have a few of them left, provided my health holds up. I’ve made my peace with getting old, a stage that ought to be lived proudly, serenely, and called what it is (please pull the plug if I insist on saying “age is just a number” or that I’m “seventy-three years young” or, heaven forbid, I call myself  “older” into my nineties). And I have made my peace with the natural order: rather than hold center stage until they drag me off with a hook, I can now enjoy my place wherever I stand on it, wherever my light moves to the left or right. It is their turn. I fear for them. I pray for them. I hear them. May we all.

Mark McNease is the author of eight novels, two short story collections and miscellaneous fiction. He’s the co-editor of the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), as well as the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.