The Time of Our Lives (2 page)
Read The Time of Our Lives Online
Authors: Tom Brokaw
The clock is part of my earliest memories of family and place. It has made its way through four generations of the Brokaw family, from the Dakota Territory to California, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The clock now presides over the rustic dining room in our century-old ranch house on the edge of the Montana wilderness. When my mother visits we always remark on how it has been more than a timepiece. It is, in its own way, a witness to our lives and to all the changes we have experienced.
Almost every family has a piece of furniture or photograph or favorite place that represents a connection between the past, the present, and the future. We count on them to bind us together, and we cling to them as familiar icons when the future begins to challenge THE PAST.
The Brokaw timepiece.
It has been in our family for a hundred years.
(Photo Credit prf.1)
With my mother at my side I looked at the family clock with a fresh appreciation of all we’d been through and how far we’d come, and I tried to imagine what a new day will bring. When Mother returned to California after her last visit, I looked up at that fixed sight in the farmhouse and thought about our family, about other families, and about America, past, present, future—the time of our lives in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The clock has been such a constant that I’d taken it for granted as just another decorative piece in our living quarters, until that moment. Perhaps because of my own acute awareness of time left, of having our grandchildren visit here with their parents and my mother—four generations under one roof—I watched the magisterial sweep of the second hand and the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour passage registered on its stately face with a new appreciation of all that it has witnessed: generations past and present of the Brokaw family, and by extension, the American family.
The clock has a soft tick tock, tick tock that has measured so much change, large and small.
Tick, tock. The arrival of electricity and telephones to the remote reaches of rural America, places still untamed no more than 120 years ago.
Tick, tock. Steel mills and railroads, automobiles and airplanes, oil fields and amber waves of grain, new cities and new industries beginning to fulfill the promise of the twentieth century as the time America came of age.
Tick, tock. World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the soaring stock market and its sickening crash, the Great Depression and a landscape of despair.
Tick, tock. The rise of Adolf Hitler and his maniacal followers, the spreading stain across Mother Russia where a revolution in the name of workers’ rights gave way to brutal oppression on a historic scale.
Tick, tock. Pearl Harbor and the end of American innocence about its fortress invulnerability. World War II, fought on six of the seven continents, in the skies above and the seas below. More than fifty million people perish. The world is introduced to a new form of madness, the Holocaust. The beginning of the nuclear age and the Cold War between one colossus in the east and another in the west.
Tick, tock. An unparalleled prosperity sweeps across America, giving rise to a middle class that anchors an economy of home ownership, good wages, college education, and the expectation that every generation will enjoy more than the last.
Tick, tock. The race to space in the heavens and the chaos of generational upheaval on the planet below. Vietnam opens wounds still not entirely healed. America confronts the shameful realties of two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. A president brings the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis before he is forced to resign.
Tick, tock. The dissolution of the Soviet empire, the rise of a new China, and the enterprise of Pan-Asia. Islamic rage and more wars. Personal computers, the Internet, and a wired and wireless world. Medical miracles and environmental anxieties. An African American president is elected, and a severe economic recession shatters confidence in long-held assumptions on the fundamentals of American security.
The family clock keeps on ticking, requiring from time to time a winding up or some delicate maintenance. Our children and grandchildren pass by, glancing at its hands to measure the time of an appointment or the hours left in the long daylight of Montana summer days. In their digital world it must seem to be a curiosity or a useful relic, but perhaps one day they, too, will use it as a calibrator of great, wrenching change.
As a journalist and a fully engaged citizen, I am both excited and more than a little unnerved by the magnitude of the changes we have seen and the prospect of those yet to come. We are swept up in a cosmic storm of new technologies that are at once unifying, liberating, and terrifying. We are living through “the Second Big Bang”: A new universe is being formed in cyberspace and we’re trying to determine which of these new “planets” will support life and which are merely distractions; which will drift too close to the sun and burn up and which will flourish. Will we master this astonishing technology or become hostage to it?
These are not unique questions. Every new technology frontier generates concerns about wise use and societal impact. Steamships and flight; automobiles, electricity, and telephones; antibiotics and X-rays; nuclear power and space travel: All prompted speculation about benefits and penalties.
But nothing has changed the world as swiftly or as dramatically as the power of cyber technology and its capability of retrieving, sharing, and acting on information about everything from a good cup of coffee to the best treatment for a rare form of cancer, from buying a multibillion-dollar corporation to starting a revolution.
How, then, should we use this technology to create a national dialogue on what we want for our grandchildren—mine, Claire, Meredith, Vivian, and Charlotte, or yours—and those who may be yet to come? How will those future generations think of us? What personal values and public citizenship commitments will we leave them? How will we respond, now and going forward, to the manifest challenges facing all of us in the brief time we have on this precious planet?
Long after I am gone, with some gentle care, the Brokaw clock should still be in the family, its rhythmic cadence measuring the passage of new generations and reminding them of what has gone before.
What do we have to offer those who will be examining our time and accomplishments?
To begin, a suggestion to remind us of our most fundamental obligation: It is time to reenlist as citizens.
Tick, tock.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
PART ONE
Getting the Fundamentals Right
CHAPTER 2
One Nation, Indivisible
CHAPTER 3
K Through Twelve and the Hazards Along the Way
CHAPTER 4
Old School Ties and New World Requirements
CHAPTER 5
Don’t Know Much About Geometry
CHAPTER 10
The United States Academy of Public Service
CHAPTER 11
Stepping Up and Signing Up
PART THREE
Help Me Make It Through This New Dot-Com Age
CHAPTER 12
Wire the World but Don’t Short-Circuit Your Soul
CHAPTER 13
Everyone’s a Journalist
PART FOUR
What Now, Grandma and Grandpa?
CHAPTER 15
Balancing the Book of Life
CHAPTER 16
Failure Is an Option
CHAPTER 17
The Grandparent Lode
CHAPTER 18
September of My Years
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Generations
FACT:
In every century of America’s history we have been the beneficiaries of sacrifice and selflessness in the face of great odds to build a stronger country: The Founding Fathers of the eighteenth century fought a bloody revolution for freedom. The great losses of the Civil War were necessary to preserve the union. The pioneers who pushed west endured countless hardships as they opened the rest of the continent. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression helped save the world in World War II and gave us modern America.