Annually, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year teaching generations of children history. Unfortunately, we teach them so much ancient history there remains precise little time for recent history. Current history unfolds before their eyes and ours, but that history of twenty-five or fifty or even seventy-five years ago is lost. This creates a gap in historical knowledge that, without effort on the part of someone, persists and may never be filled. As cases in point, it appears relevant given the current times to illustrate this cultural phenomenon and point to how it has the potential for setting back certain progress in American society much to its detriment.
Let's begin with the rise in teen smoking witnessed over the last ten years. Children who went to elementary school in the early 1970s to early 80s were bombarded with anti-smoking information. Traveling exhibits of lucite encased lungs of smokers and non-smokers toured schools across the nation. Posters of disgusting and despicable-looking people holding cigarettes were plastered on the walls. Worse, growing up breathing the exhaust fumes, as we used to call it, exhaled from our chain-smoking parents so addicted to these things as to be willing to crawl five miles in a blizzard across broken glass to obtain them but not milk for morning cereal was the final nail in the coffin to ensure that the generation of people now in their 40s smoked so little that passing anti-smoking laws was a breeze in our lifetime. Complacency set it, however. Since fewer were smoking, why bother to send around the lung exhibits? Why not take down the posters and replace them with messages about reading being fundamental? Certainly, our offspring never breathed our non-existent exhaust. Ergo, and ironically the next generations grew up with only the mystery of smoking on their minds.
This curious historical anomaly has reared its ugly head in two other highly troubling and growing sentiments among the youth of America as they begin to enter their age of governmental influence – meaning they are caring about politics and making sure their votes count. The first of these is the growing anti-union sentiment in the nation. Talk to young people who did not grow up in strong union families and union states and they will tell you that unions are ruining our nation. They are commanding outrageous wages for people doing menial jobs and forcing the export of the very jobs they wish to protect. It is as if they think unions were invented in a vacuum to put business out of business. It is as if the idea that a company might actually be guilty of doing its employees wrong has never occurred to anyone. These people grew up in a nation where workers rights were protected by unions, therefore, companies were kept in check. All this union busting and the eventual downfall of workers' rights, however, will lead directly back to what? Businesses will start smoking again, and then people may years of work to get rights of workers enacted will have to be repeated.
The second is in the complete and utter switcheroo on abortion. Twenty years ago, Roe v. Wade was on the tip of everyone's tongues as were the rights of women to control their own bodies and destiny. Abortion rights emerged on the backs of the class issues, and because young people today have never lived in America at a time when abortion was not legal, they do not know the other side at all. They are perfectly fine with current members of Congress tying the entire nation's budgetary future to funding for Planned Parenthood. Why? Because they've never known a nation without it. They are oblivious to the fact that the well-to-do sent their young illegitimately pregnant daughters to 'finishing school' in France to escape stigma and problems. They are unaware that poor young pregnant women who so feared for their lives as to consider suicide, were rendered sterile or dead in back-alley, coat-hangar abortions, and please forgive the gruesome nature of that description, but the thing is gruesome. They are complete out of touch with the reality that there will always be abortions, legal or otherwise. There does not always have to be, however, the grief, the sterility, the shame, and the stigma. There also don't have to be as many abortions. No one talks about how many abortions Planned Parenthood stops. Abortion is not the first suggestion at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Abortions are a messy, traumatic, and horrifying experience that results in a life-changing decision that many, many women spend the rest of their lives regretting. Who exactly is supposed to help them either (a) not make the decision or (b) survive the decision as whole as possible? It would be nice if every daughter had two loving and caring parents like Bristol Palin, but this is not the case for far too many young women. Eliminating Planned Parenthood gives them where to go in cases where they fear telling their parents? Does it force them to tell them? If you have every worked with teenage women, you would know that the ones who will tell will tell either way, and the ones who won't won't be forced into it. Instead, they will seek another way. The other ways are brutal, cold, inhuman, and far worse. They tend to end up in execution of the task rather than counseling toward adoption. The stigma associated with the act being illegal also creates a culture of fear and increases the flight of the male partner's responsibility further alienating the young woman and isolating her from society. Is this the goal of foes of Planned Parenthood? All of this is made more ironic when one considers that it has long been the champion cause of the conservatives in the United States to eliminate government regulations and intervention into people's lives. What could be more intrusive than to have the government in one's face at such a time of crisis rather than the support of ones family, friends, and spiritual advisors / counselors? Young people today do not know about any of this because they have no friends that have died from a coat-hangar induced infection, none that killed themselves rather than tell their parents, none that were rendered infertile by quacks and charlatans running fake clinics to prey on the weak.
Older generations have a duty to inform on recent history and fill the gaps rather than letting the single-minded and greedy capitalize on it for their own political and economic gains. It would be an egregious error to allow our great nation to take so many steps backward because the younger generations never knew these struggles. They are also apparently oblivious to the idea that it is far, far, far harder to ever get back rights that have been taken away. Once you give up a right, you may never see it again. The battle to give women the right to choose was fought on the backs of millions. Workers rights took decades to earn and secure. Look what happened to our nation the minute we forget to teach kids the dangers of smoking?