My daughter will be nineteen years young this upcoming May, 2008. She’s my only child, and perhaps it’s that singularity that made my pregnancy and her birth so momentous for me. But, some shocking and world-shaking events happened during that time, and I’ll never forget them. It seems that when my daughter entered my life, she altered my memory (and my heart) forever.
One of those events happened on the 22nd of December in 1988, nineteen years ago today. Like President Kennedy’s assassination and the murder of Martin Luther King, I remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that a bomb had exploded on Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747, as it flew over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 258 individuals on the plane perished, as well as eleven people on the ground. As the plane smashed into the ground, it destroyed 40 homes and triggered an explosion at a gas station.
That bomb seemed to emphasize a year filled with international tension. Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had condemned author Salman Rushdie to death for his book, “The Satanic Verses
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Believe it or not, global warming was a hot topic in 1988 (which shows how little progress the U.S. has made over that time on this issue). However, denial about global warming was hotter then than it is now. When Newsweek made global warming an issue on its first 1988 cover, even one of its own editors called the article “highly contrived” in the following issue. Later that year, U.S. beaches closed as a record heat wave hit, and droughts caused widespread major crop and livestock damage across the U.S. That heat wave wouldn’t meet its match again until seven years later in 1995.
And, just a mere three weeks previous to the Lockerbie disaster, an earthquake in Armenia killed up to 45,000 individuals and left another 500,000 homeless. I’m sure previous natural disasters of this magnitude had occurred before (like Pompeii, perhaps), but it seemed to me at the time that this was a portent of things to come. Even the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake that left about 700 dead didn’t touch the number of people killed in the Armenian earthquake. Life seemed very fragile and uncertain, and the choices offered in the presidential election that year didn’t buoy any enthusiasm about the future.
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George Bush (the daddy) won the presidential election in November 1988 with Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Bush defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Duakakis with the attitude that “America had spoken” with his victory. It was with this same political fervor that Bush rallied the United Nations, Congress, the American people and 425,000 troops along with 118,000 allied troops to war against Iraq between 1990-1991. Although that war lasted only weeks, Bush claimed victory. That war altered local, regional, and international politics forever, and it continued to lay the groundwork for current conditions between the U.S. and Iran and Iraq. Also, this was the first international war where biological weapons were a factor.
If that year wasn’t enough to push me into deep breathing exercises and yoga to maintain a sense of calm for myself and for my unborn child, 1989 proved even more disturbing. The demonstrations at Tiananmen Square began a month before my daughter was born, and a massacre ended those demonstrations a month after my daughter’s birth. During those two months, the world learned that democracy wasn’t prevalent in China. The massacre of hundreds of civilians by Chinese military created an enormous impact on the course of China’s relationship with the rest of the world.
When news of the massacre reached the U.S., sanctions were laid on that country, high-level contracts were suspended, and there was an abrupt halt in the transfer of military technology. The tragedy was so widely condemned that President Bill Clinton’s photo op at Tiananmen Square almost a decade later in 1998 was looked upon with raised eyebrows. Now - at the brink of 2008 - American consumers are subject to problems developing from demand for cheap goods produced by China’s sweat shop labor. While some instances - like toxins in dog food and toothpaste - seem unavoidable and unexpected, American consumers should know by now that it should cost more to purchase a box of Christmas ornaments than it does to ship them.
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That’s what I teach my teenage daughter now…that a box of $2.00 Christmas ornaments has something inherently wrong with it. Nothing from China comes that cheap without hurting someone somewhere, especially when the dollar has hit new lows and exporting should be - by all economics accounts - much less expensive than importing. I just find it ironic and somewhat depressing that when I need something from the store I have to hunt through nine out of ten objects to find something NOT made in China. And, this is all my daughter knows. She doesn’t know a world that was “Made in America” (although that idea wasn’t so great for a lot of people, either), nor does she know a world without fear.
My daughter has experienced the London bombings (we were in the station next to King’s Cross when the bombs went off), and she survived Hurricane Katrina. She’s lived through only three presidents (two of them from the same family), two Iraqi wars (both supervised by Bush administrations), and the fall of the World Trade Center towers in the first attack against Americans on American soil.* All this in less than two decades. While my daughter seems to bounce off disasters like a rubber ball, she displays other symptoms that tell me how deeply she feels her pain. Despite this hurt and fear, I’ve watched her reach out to help others before she helps herself.
But I digress…there was some hope in 1989, and I do want to end my reminiscing on a high note. Despite all the man made and natural disasters that occurred throughout my pregnancy and my daughter’s birth, one event on 9 November 1989 seemed to lift the world out of its funk. When my daughter was about six months old, the Berlin Wall “fell,” and the border that separated Western from Eastern Germany was opened. This act officially ended the Cold War era. The wall was built in 1962, when I was in second grade, and to watch such a political change occur within my lifetime was nothing short of miraculous.
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Many other miracles and disasters occurred since my daughter’s birth, and they all seem so much more important to me because my daughter’s life is affected by these events. I certainly don’t like the fact that my daughter learns about cruelty and lack of compassion from world leaders. I also don’t like the fact that she learns that it’s “ok” to be pregnant at age 16 from Hollywood. And I can’t stand it when she learns from CEOs that it’s “ok” to steal with nothing more than minimal jail time or a slap on the hand. I don’t like that she learns that it’s “ok” when giant corporations such as Microsoft begin to dictate how consumers use goods.
It’s my job as a mother to answer questions that have no answers (”So if what Microsoft is doing with OOXML is so wrong, then how come Bill Gates [Microsoft founder and CEO] is so nice to the underprivileged, mom?”). It’s my job to point out all the people who make a real difference in this world so that she can maintain hope and faith. And, it’s my job to show her that it’s the ordinary individual who often makes the real difference on an every day basis. This information empowers my daughter like no politician or actor or actress ever could.
The point is to emphasize the good while doing whatever possible to help the oppressed. Although my brother firmly believes that Americans are too drugged on anti-depressants to give a damn about anything, I believe that there’s hope lingering in the many small activist groups that remain diligent. And, if parents can manage to keep their children from ingesting unnecessary prescription drugs (or any other harmful drugs), perhaps those children will grow to learn how to give a damn about what happens to this earth and to the people who inhabit her.
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I firmly believe that having children will affect your memory and your heart. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has created more of an impression on my memory than the birth of my daughter and the condition of the world that my daughter entered in 1989. But if you don’t have children, don’t feel deprived. There are plenty of children who don’t have homes, who are missing a parent, or who don’t have parents or families at all.
Although I have a big heart (thanks to my daughter), I can’t change the world by myself. So I hope you’ll lend a hand during this holiday season. If you can help just one child with one small problem, you can change the world. I don’t care if that child is rich, poor, black, white, or anything in between. The child doesn’t know what his or her social status means. He or she only knows how it feels to hurt, which is the opposite of happiness and the harbinger of cynicism, fear, and hate. If you can change that child’s pain to joy with one simple act (or even with a complicated and drawn out solution), that child’s expression will be your holiday gift and that child will be your gift to the world.
That’s the strength that children have - they have the power to change a person’s memory and heart forever. They’re the only ones who can save us, and this world’s only hope. Ignore them at your peril.
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* The Revolutionary War doesn’t count, as this land belonged to the British at that time. Although fought on American soil, the Civil War doesn’t count, either. That fight to end human slavery in the states was fought amongst Americans (although the French did help the Yankees in a huge way).
Posted by Linda at 7:00 AM PST
