Between Two Worlds

I was born roughly in the midst of the twentieth century. Behind me lay the world of kerosene lamps and outdoor plumbing; ahead loomed the age of video games, the internet and untold technological wonders. My grandparents had known horse‑drawn transportation, radio and silent movies. My grandchildren would take for granted things that still seemed miraculous to me.

When I entered the world, doctors still made house calls and remembered your name. At the same time, parents everywhere believed they were winning the war on polio—unaware that a greater threat, AIDS, was waiting in the wings. Medicine was brimming with promise, both to lengthen life and to improve its quality. Around this progress sprouted new ethical questions—genetic engineering, cloning, partial‑birth abortion—issues unimaginable at the previous century’s dawn.

In the 1950s, black‑and‑white television entered homes and changed them forever. Today, even Christians watch entertainment filled with violence, adultery, off‑color language—things that once would have been unthinkable. While successive generations see their worlds expand in experience (video games, the internet, psychoactive drugs), they often shrink emotionally: grandparents leave home for nursing homes, parents lose their own households to divorce, and latch‑key kids emerge as a new norm. The children of divorced or never‑married parents see that arrangement as “normal”—while children of parents married and living together become the exception.

My grandparents had a hand‑cranked telephone; today, communication may mean hours before a computer screen or earbuds in the ear while we walk the community. My parents experienced airline travel as a novelty; by contrast, I watched humans land on the moon before my mother flew halfway across the U.S. My grandmother benefited from the fight for women’s suffrage, and my generation encountered financial insecurity—depression, recession, trade‑offs marked by uncertainty—bookending the era we occupy.

We must be willing to look into the past and learn from it, as well as to look into the future and dream with it.

In the threshold of time
To stand on a threshold between past and present—and to know it—is one thing; to be born and unaware of your place is another. Embracing the meaning of that position requires stepping outside where we are and looking at both sides of the doorway. We must look backward and learn, look ahead and dream.

My generation has a specific obligation: to examine both worlds, retain the best parts, and sift out the distractions that would draw us away from the foundational issues of life. Some things never change—morality, purpose, meaning—whether in the 20th century or the 21st. I am who I am because I have held hands with both past and future. I have heard stories of where we came from. I have glimpsed—though limited and blurred—where we are going. Those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s hold a unique position in history.

We owe a debt to those who went before us: to pass down the sense of purpose, the ethics, the values they handed to us. Without that balance on life’s seesaw, the rapid and remarkable “advances” of the last half‑century might not bring fulfillment, but instead become the start of our undoing.

Ignoring the past just because it is the past could keep us from being prepared for the most important future we will ever face.