My 8th-grade students have academic blogs. This week, I asked them to look at the inventions of the time period since 1899 and explain which one they thought was the most important. Of course, most students wrote about the internet and the smartphone. A few got clever with things like chicken nuggets and chocolate chip cookies. Several wrote about air conditioning. One of the boys who wrote about air conditioning made this statement. "If we didn't have air conditioning then I don't think that mankind would still be alive." Now, he's in the 8th grade, and they are prone to exaggeration, but it got me wondering if he realized how recently the invention of the air conditioner is in relation to human history. It was invented less than 120 years ago and wasn't used in the majority of homes until the late 1960s. The human race had survived since Adam and Eve without it until about 55 years ago.
Don't misunderstand, I am also very grateful for Willis Carrier's invention, but this middle school blog post got me thinking about how limited our perspective is on what we can endure. It also reminded me of what I've been seeing on social media in the past six months from people who don't believe themselves capable of doing the things we need to do to get through the current pandemic. I've seen so many words like "unsustainable" and "incapable" and "cannot possibly endure until May." Repeating these words to ourselves and reading them over and over has a deleterious impact on our brains because they fail to put human capabilities in perspective. Let's do that.
My grandparents grew up in the Great Depression and fought World War II. Depending on the criteria used, the Great Depression is calculated to have lasted between nine and eleven years. The average deployment length for an army soldier in World War II was around ten months, but many served more than one deployment. They endured 24 hours per day without a break (and, I might remind you, no air conditioning) away from family under the constant threat of death. We are being asked to work longer hours with more duties, but we go home at the end of the day in our cars to climate-controlled homes.
Their grandparents, by the way, fought World War I and endured the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed from 2.7% to 5% of the world's population. Those fighting in the trenches experienced or observed multiple diseases, from cholera to typhoid. They slept in dirt, sometimes surrounded by their fallen brothers. When supply lines were blocked, they survived on food rations that we wouldn't think enough food to survive, much less do an important job with. We were asked to sit on our sofas, watching Netflix and eating food that was delivered to our house two hours after we ordered it.
Perhaps it isn't fair that I've focused on the conditions of war since they aren't representative of everyday life. Let's continue this historical tour of human endurance. Those born in the 1850s came of age during the time of the Civil War, but thanks to The Homestead Act, many took on the challenge of settling the West. Traveling in covered wagons, they endured bitterly cold winters and risk of diseases in frequency we cannot imagine today (in spite of kids rediscovering the video game Oregon Trail). When they finally arrived in the West, they had to clear land for farming and ranching, build their homes, and sew clothes. Should I remind you that they didn't have air conditioning or running water for that matter? Their version of self-care was . . . nope, I can't finish that sentence because self-care was a concept not yet invented.
We could keep going. There's the generation that literally formed America by writing a constitution after fighting a revolution. There are those who spent months on boats, traveling the oceans. Before that, there were those who got on boats, not knowing their destination or even if there was a destination because they believed it was possible they would fall off the edge of the earth. We can go all the way back to those who literally lived in caves. People who did not know where their next meal was coming from established civilization for the generations that followed, and we have staged protests over the closing of restaurants while eating food that was put in our car at the curb.
I'm not saying this year hasn't been difficult. Of course, it has been. But it is not unsustainable. Our responsibilities have increased, but they are not beyond human capability. People have endured conditions far worse than these for far longer than a school year. Repeat after me. WE CAN DO THIS!
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