By Mickey Dunaway

Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine | August 2024| Cornelius, NC.

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For the last month, the part of my brain where ideas are almost always brewing has been particularly active around with the discord around the world—Israel and Gaza, Africa’s warlords, Putin’s continued rise to immoral power in Russia, climate change, political and financial unrest in the United States, and artificial intelligence. 

The question that keeps returning is this: How will this discord affect the college generations of today and tomorrow?

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In late May, I went for a pre-op blood draw for my early June knee replacement surgery (done and done successfully!) There, on the wall of the lab, was a nicely framed picture of six Army and Navy veterans. It turns out that the photographs were of relatives of the nurse who would momentarily draw my blood—all veterans of various conflicts from WWII to Vietnam. 

Seeing those pictures of the nurse’s family reminded me of the Dunaway men who fought in WWII and about my mother and four aunts. I have pondered a lot about how the young men and women must have worried and wondered before America entered the war. 

They were so young. They were married early. And gave birth to their first children as their husbands entered the conflict. I have wondered for a long time since I started working on my family’s ancestry—especially around World War II—and a question finally emerged: What was it like for my parents, aunts, and uncles in the late 1930s with Winds of War (a great book by William Wouk) steadily circling the globe?

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Similar storm clouds of international conflict face today’s young adults, and they come at them with complexity and blinding speed. 

For many of my age, the generation I write about here is our grandchildren. I have one about to graduate from college, one who just graduated from high school, and one who will graduate high school next spring. Their future is coming. I can almost touch it. Nothing to worry about? Sure.

For my generation, it was the flames simmering in South Vietnam. As a freshman at Auburn, I was ignorant of the goings on a half continent away until the draft was re-instituted, but when the government connected the draft to college grades,  I worried a lot. 

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I wonder if artificial intelligence will be the Pearl Harbor (or Vietnam) for future generations. Are they prepared for the international policy implications of technology in their futures? 

I always considered myself ahead of the technology curve, but as the story below illustrates, it just wasn’t so.

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I grew into adulthood with the beginning of the personal computer—an Apple //e.   It had two floppy drives (and they were floppy). The drives help 128K of data. The //e had no function keys and no hard drive. I wrote my dissertation on that dinosaur in the early 1980s. I kept my drafts on floppies stored at home, in the school safe, and in the car trunk. I was so afraid that something would happen. There was no Internet on which to do my research. Microfilm held all the data—if you could find it. Data found in periodicals was in the green readers guide. Data in books meant going to the card catalog! From those beginnings, I now write and research on a 24″ iMac with 8GB of memory connected to 1 GB of Internet speed, and that is all in my house!

Yet, I realize that at 77, I still need to stay on top of technology with each new software upgrade to my iMac, my iPhone, my Apple Watch, and my Subaru!

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Heck, I bought a new Subaru Outback a few months back, and the damn thing has facial recognition and tells me “Hello, Mickey” when I crank up and “Goodbye” when I shut it down! And differentiates between me and my wife. It tells me when my eyes have wandered from the highway and the car’s computer is connected by the Wi-Fi at my house to the great Subaru dealership in the sky that sends me a monthly report on my car’s health. I like it, but one must admit that it is spooky!

I depend on my iPhone. I rely on about 30% of the functions that I understand! And don’t even get me started on how much I love my Apple Watch! 

As our world increases in complexity, we must find time to laugh at our place in the quickly evolving world and the future just beyond the horizon.  The software glitch that kept jets and airports shut down could just as easily as our electrical grid or our water system. Heaven help us should that happen on purpose, thanks to the Russians, the Chinese, or some 15-year-old in Milwaukee hacking away on his laptop in his bedroom.

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You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. – Abraham Lincoln