Just a few weeks earlier, the conversation in my family focused on something: Where my daughter was going to college. She’s a senior in high school, high-achieving, and very driven. We invested the fall slaving over college essays and applications, 11 in total. The wait to hear from the schools she used to was painful for her, and although today’s college admissions messaging is completely electronic, she would even generate the mail at the end of every day– otherwise unheard of in our home– to see if there was something from a school waiting for her.
Now all we speak about is Covid-19
The coronapocalypse has actually been ravaging for us grownups, but its impact on teenagers is perhaps far higher. At age 48, I have actually seen a fair number of society’s ups and downs. I was born during Watergate, panicked about nuclear holocaust thanks to The Day After as a tween, and saw the very first Gulf War unfold on the televisions in my college’s trainee union. Sure, I wasn’t standing in bread lines or dealing with the firebombing of my city, but the last 48 years have actually had their share of catastrophe and upheaval.
Zoe was born in 2002, a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Things were searching for at the time, and they have actually remained quite rosy by comparison. Yes, we had the intrusion of Iraq, the spike in school shootings, environment change, the 2008 real estate crisis, and #MeToo, but we also had an unmatched explosion in both creativity and commerce. All of the tech services we now enjoy, from Facebook to Netflix, got going in these years. B