The following has been done by many others and in numerous distinct ways. Still, I find the exercise instructive. So, here is my personal go at it.

We all have a tendency to think our times are unique. For some, it might be the best of times, for others the worst. We implicitly judge our experience against the past (or an imagined future) since that is the only way we can assess the meaning of any singular experience or understanding. I have given away my perception of the world, and how I experienced things, when I assert that I’m glad to be an old fart. That might suggest how I think about a dark past and, simultaneously, suggest what I see in a bleak future. Neither is a pretty picture. Then again, I have always been a dark cloud Irishman, so my opinion indeed means little.

No matter, just for the fun of it, let us imagine you come into this world at the turn of the 20th century, in 1900. That would have been my grandparents era. What kind of world would you have seen and experienced over the course of a long life.

1900 … you are born kicking and screaming.

By age 14, you are old enough to be aware of the broader world. You might already have spent some years doing back breaking work in a coal mine or farm field or a sweat shop since Child Labor laws had just been introduced as part of the Progressive Era’s political agenda.

Let’s say you were lucky and in school, not a guarantee in that era. You would be aware of the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914, a few weeks after some Archduke you never knew existed was assassinated in some place you could not find on a map. That conflict, fought with more modern weapons but outdated tactics, resulted in over 20 million deaths including almost 120,000 Americans.

That war is coming to an end in 1918, just in time to experience the rampant fears associated with the Spanish Flu which was misnamed since most epidemiologists believe in started somewhere in Kansas. The movement of troops help spread this killer virus in an era before vaccines. Globally, some 50 million perish.

At age 23, Facism makes its debut in Italy under Mussolini but you might not notice at the time since he allegedly made the trains run on time which, knowing the Italians, seems like a miracle.

During the roaring twenties, as you enter adulthood, all seems well except in Europe where simmering hatreds from the first World War are preparing everyone for the next one. You hardly notice as European powers exploit and abuse colonial subjects around the world. Back home, however, if you were paying attention, you would notice some disturbing things. The Klu Klux Klan has been a rising force (again) in the South and in other parts of the country. While many prospered, others suffered greatly and without legal recourse. Even Indiana, a northern states, was controlled largely by KKK sympathizers and a huge march of hooded members made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to cheering crowds. Our immigration laws had been changed to keep out so-called undesirables thus making a mockery of the poem by Emma Lazarus etched on the Statue of Liberty. It was not a good time to be a miinority, a gay, an immigrant from a non-favored country, or even a women.

As the 20s roared, great inequalities in income and wealth continued to grow but most fail to notice. Perhaps you even buy stocks on margin to take advantage of the wide-open, unregulated economy. Then, at age 29, the bottom falls out of the bubble in an over heated market. A global depression hits and the U.S. government, wedded to conventional economic policies, does everything wrong … they try to balance the budget by lowering spending and tightening the money supply. The country sinks into despair and widespread suffering (Read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath). Note: Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK, got out of the market before the crash. As the story goes, he knew the market was in deep trouble when he discovered that the shoe-shine boy he frequented was ‘playing the market.’

As you hit your 30s, Nazism comes of age in Germany and the outlines of the next war begin when Japan seeks its manifest destiny by attacking Manchuria and Mussolini invades Etheopia. Hundreds of thousands are killed in each such atrocity but the world hardly takes notice though the League of Nation totters. The Japanese ‘rape of Nanking’ saw at least 300,000 Chinese civilians brutally slaughtered and the world did nothing.

Age 37 … a military coup ends Spanish Democracy and Generalissimo Franco, aided by Nazi Germany, overthrows the elected government in Spain after a savage civil war. Many Americans fight in what is known as the Lincoln Brigade to save one of the shrinking number of democracies on continental Europe but to no avail. The internal hatreds and reprisals continue for decades.

At age 39, what had been a simmering conflict breaks out into the open when Hitler invades Poland. England and France honor their commitments to that suffering nation and what is a continuation of the first world conflict to many flares anew. Some 70 or million people will die in this global conflict (depending on when you set the start date).

You are 41 when you wake one Sunday morning to find that a place called Pear Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese and 2,700 American soldiers killed. FDR declares war on Japan the next day. Then Hitler, for some bizarre reason, declares war on the United States, which conveniently gave FDR an excuse to come to England’s aid over the objections of the isolationists who had dominated American politics to that point. Over 400,000 Americans would die, a comparatively trivial number compared to the 22 million Russians, 20 million Chinese, and 6 million Jews who perished in this insanity.

At age 50, the Korean war breaks out as the Communist North attacks the South. The United Nations, under American leadership, rushes to the South’s assistance. This happened shortly after Russia exploded their own atomic bomb and solidied control of Eastern Europe behind what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain. With China falling to to the Communists under Mao, a full fledged Cold War would rage for the next four decades between Communism and Democracy. America sunk into a miasma or paranoia and finger pointing known as McCarthyism (after Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy) as the rights of American to express their beliefs were trampled by rampant fears of a Red menace. A legitimate fear did exist. It was a world teetering on the edge of self destruction in a nuclear holocaust. Remember the doomsday clock. It always seemed a minute or two from midnight signifying the end of the world as we knew it.

You turn age 60 or so when the simmering Civil Rights movement comes to your attention in the first sit-ins. There had been that bus boycott somewhere but now the pace of civil disobedience picked up as Black college students sat at Southern Woolworth counters and insisted on being served. A decade of unrest, violence, church bombings, lynchings, assassinations, and full scale riots would take place, accompanied by a host of other ‘rights’ movements. The end of legal apartheid (around 1965) in America does not happen peacefully. It looks as if the country is falling apart. It reaches a peak in 1968 when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are gunned down and a police riot breaks out in Chicago at the Democratic Convention when leftists bring their opposition to the Vietnam war before the public. Exciting and disturbing times indeed.

What might have affected you the most during your 6th decade is the Cuban missile crisis. You would have been 62 years old when the Americans and the Soviets went toe to toe over an island 90 miles off the coast of Florida. We were within a hairbreath of devolving into a nuclar holocaust. A soviet sub, isolated and under attack by depth charges at the quarantene line around Cuba established by JFK, almost fired their nuclear missiles as they thought WWIII had broken out. Only one of the three officers in charge on board refused permission to launch what would have surely started a nuclear holocaust.

Then, you are 63 when the hero of that missile crisis, JFK, is gunned down in Dallas. You cried and the nation, most of the world, mourned. However, you do notice that many Americans among a growing right wing segment in society cheered his passing. It disturbed you but you dismiss them as a marginal number of cranks and nutters. Your mistake.

Later, you wondered if things in Vietnam would have gone differently had JFK survived. But, as you turn 64, the war by proxy in that far away land turns into an American war as combat troops are sent in. It was a conflict that had percolated since the French were given back control of the Vietnam after WWII ended but which intensified after promised unfication elections in 1956 were dismissed by the West when the Communists were seen as likely victors. As America became more deeply involved, college campuses in the States turned into tear gas filled battlegrounds.

That is not the only conflict by any imagination. You are 67, when the so called 6-day war breaks out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It is the 3rd such conflict and not the last. This will remain a part of the globe you keep a wary eye on as you watch Walter Cronkite on the evening news. There is much conflict in Africa as the final vestiges of the old colonial period are finally ended, sometimes reluctantly.

You are 69 when The Troubles break out in Northern Ireland where Catholics are inspired by the U.S. Civil rights movement and seek an end to their own 2nd class citizenship while uniting these six counties still under British control with the rest of Ireland. If you are Irish you cannot look away as the horrific struggle endures for some three decades until the Good Friday Peace Agreement ended outright hostilities in 1998.

You are now retired at age 74 when the Watergate scandal comes to fruition and President Nixon resigns. You wonder how that could have happened but are satisfied that the system worked and that America remains a government of laws. You could never imagine a future with a Donald Trump trampling on the traditions that made the United States special, though not unique.

At age 80, a political revolution comes to fruition … The political right takes dominant control of the Republican Party, an internal struggle that had been going on ever since the Brown vs. the Board of education SCOTUS decison almost two decades earlier. It would take more time for the hard right to gain full control but the economic effects of this conservative swing begin at this time. It would be the end of America’s economic golden age where the middle class bloomed, poverty and inequality fell, and even the kids of working class stiffs (like me) had no trouble realizing their potential. Now, an elite economic oligarchy would increasingly have their way. The number of decamillionaires ($10 million or more) would rise from only 63,000 in 1979 to almost 700,000 (accounting for inflation) in 2019. The share of income of the top 1 percent would rise from less than 10 percent in 1979 to almost a quarter of the entire pie in recent years. At the same time, the middle class is gradually hollowed out as more average Americans despair or turn to Opiods and other synthetic solutions. Suddenly, or not, you realize that you need to go to a Scandinavian country to find the American dream (and happy citizens … Finlanders are the happiest according to the latest international hedonic study).

Suddenly you realize you are very old, you reach your 90s. The old Soviet Union implodes, which you applaud. Then, at age 93, the World Trade Center is bombed by Islamic terrorists. Now, you have new international worry to keep you awake at nights. Almost a decade later, it would get worse when the Trade Center is taken down.

The next year, 1994, the country shifts a bit more to the right when Newt Gingrich takes charge of the Republican Party and leads it on a scorched earth policy. From this moment on, there would be no civility, no political compromise (though he did agree with Clinton on NAFTA, the only exception to his rule of opposing anything the Dems did). Politics would now be a fight to the death, no prisoners. PERSONAL NOTE: I was in Washington during this period. A key Republican operative on the Hill told me that Newt was a ‘revolutionary, not a politician.’ He was consumed by a desire for power, not governing. He told me that they had fines for Republican members of Congress who used the wrong words. They could never call the tax on estates the Inheritance Tax, you had to call it the ‘Death Tax.’ Juvenile, but effective.

At age 96, the Fox News network comes on line, a natural next step after the creation of a string of new conservative Think Tanks and agenda driven groups (like the Federalist Society dedicated to creating a hard right judiciary). You recall fondly the good old days when Walter Cronkite gave you real news, not propoganda.

Age 100 … George W. Bush was elected despite losing the popular vote. In all liklihood, Bush lost the electoral vote as well since most believe Florida would have gone democratic by a thin margin, if the Supreme Court had not stepped in and stopped the counting.

You are now really happy you are old, though glad you were fortunate to have insurance to keep you going, unlike so many of your peers who died prematurely since the U.S., unique among advanced countries, does not guarantee health care to all. Then you shrug, perhaps that matters little since the American experiment in democracy appears to be coming to an end. As you finish out your long life, you register one more sad note. The NRA is gaining ernormous power and filling our streets with guns and even military grade weapons. Gun related deaths in the States soar well above rates found in any other advanced nation. America is becoming the new ‘killing field.’ You decide not to leave your nursing home ever again.

Okay, now the big question. Since the 20th century sucked big time in many ways, how could the 21st century NOT be better. It has to be, right?

Well, remember my dark cloud. As I sit with my close acquaintances and neighbors (virtually all highly educated, successful retired professionals such as doctors and academics and lawyers and engineers etc.) and chat about life, a deep pessimism arises. This is surprising since most are not even Irish. We all look ahead with deep foreboding. Almost universally, we are glad we are old and at the end of things. What are we seeing?

Climate change … the clock is ticking and we are not doing near enough to avoid irreversible damage and a global meltdown.

An end to key democratic principles … we see autocracy overtaking and replacing reason, science, and civility as the way we govern ourselves in America. There have always been wanna-be authoritarians out there but now a near majority of Americans would support a strong-man takeover of our government which the election of Trump or DeSantis or some MAGA candidate in 2024 would signify.

An irreversible trend toward hyper inequality … The last time we had hyper inequality in America was just before the big crash in 1929. Then, a global meltdown created conditions that permitted the New Deal to be enacted and an economic golden age to take place after WWII (though the States, in truth, had little economic competition). Now, Republican policies have permitted a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the top with nothing in sight to slow the trend. The elite are now free to push the inequality agenda further and further to destabilizing heights.

The end of homo-sapiens … I’m talking about Artificial Intelleigence (AI) here, which I first sounded an alarm about in 2013. This can be a boon to mankind or its end. There is no way of knowing the limits of this technology and whether they will quickly realize how superfluous and useless humans are. Remember HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Why wouldn’t the machines take over? But, that is not likely to happen until after I kick the bucket, so why worry.

More could be cited like war with China and such but that is enough with the doom and gloom. My one postive thought is that I would have been appalled in May of 1944 if I looked around at the moment of my birth (and I could appreciate what was happening). That moment in time was bleak indeed. And while bad things continued throughout my life, it wasn’t as bad as it looked on day one. In fact, there was progress on some fronts but nothing like the linear improvements my fellow college buddies and I anticipated. Compared to our hopes, things turned out spectacularly badly. Despite that, maybe, just maybe, there is meaning to the term homo-sapiens. Perhaps we will, in the end, be wise and thoughtful.

I hope so, but I sure ain’t counting on it.