What I got Wrong, Just Like Most Everyone Else

 

This isn't how Fall was supposed to be

I had to add extra fuel to the wayback machine to get material for this month’s topic, misconceptions about adulthood. I’m taking it a step further because what I came up with was bigger, scarier, and a heck of a lot more pervasive/perturbing.

When I graduated from high school in 1966, I don’t think I spent much time pondering the future. College at Arizona State and the growing unease in America about the Vietnam War, changed that. During my second semester freshman year, we were tasked with writing a research paper. For reasons I cannot remember, I chose to do mine on the economic repercussions of the air war over North Vietnam. The deeper I dug, the more horrified I became. What started out as an economic analysis soon shifted to a moral one and I realized this was not only a far too expensive war, but was immoral and one we had no business waging.

That realization and my forays into psychedelics, changed my way of looking at the world completely. I became active in the antiwar movement, marching, doing guerrilla theater on the campus mall, running as a student power candidate for the student senate, and developing a distrust of most politicians that is if anything, even stronger today. All of that was unthinkable when I was in high school.

Here are some other misconceptions about adulthood I had to get past.

1-I was going to die at age 25, so drinking and personal responsibility didn’t matter-Well I’m still here at age 78 and will celebrate 46 years of sobriety tomorrow night. Cleaning up the wreckage of the past wasn’t easy or pleasant, but helped make me a more humane soul.

2-Marriage and parenting weren’t for me-Beth and I have been married for 49 years, have two daughters and three grandchildren, so there’s that.

3-The world wasn’t going to change very much and society would continue to make some semblance of sense-Can you say things like MAGA, AI, and Trump???

4-Once the Vietnam war would be over, we might have learned that war didn’t work very well-How many terrible conflicts have there been since then?

5-Climate change?? Who, aside from scientists, had a clue?

6-That same environment would start to turn on us. My sisters and I roamed through our 187 acre farm, drinking fearlessly from brooks, and didn’t even think about ticks. Beaver poop and Lyme disease sure changed that. Nature is a lot scarier than I ever imagined back then, and the changes make for some very interesting and tense scenarios when writing these days.

All of these, plus others that escape me at the moment, have shaped my outlook on current life. I describe myself as a darkly humorous, compassionate activist, who’s not afraid to go toe to toe with bigots. My YA characters reflect all of the above, sometimes outwardly, sometimes reluctantly, but those aftereffects are there for certain.

On the street where we live