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    Letter to a Child Born Today
    Letter to a Child Born Today
    Letter to a Child Born Today
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Letter to a Child Born Today

    By John Janovy, Jr

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    About this ebook

    In despair over his nation sliding into authoritarian rule, an 82-year old scientist writes a letter to a new-born child whose name he’s just read in the paper. His nation is the United States; his letter is what life has taught him about what this child can expect if she lives to her own 82nd birthday on March 21, 2100, during a global pandemic and our ongoing assault on the American Dream by people elected to preserve that dream and make it achievable for all. The letter takes two years to write and ends up a hundred pages long. From his memory of a mother crying, shoulders heaving, while listening to a broadcast of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and photographs from liberated Nazi death camps, to his knowledge of how infectious agents, including infectious words and ideas, spread through populations, he is able to envision this child’s life based largely on factors completely beyond her control. New parents rarely if ever consider the global forces that will have a major impact on their child’s life; but we live in a time when the world comes through our front doors whether we want that to happen or not. That world includes a virus—COVID-19—as well as the infective words of hatred, racism, dehumanization, and disdain for Mother Nature. On the day he starts to write, however, he tells her his hopes based on a teacher’s experience: “But like those other 360,000 babies born today, you have the potential to be a great artist, a great musician, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, the head of some multibillion-dollar company, a famous actor, a poet, a writer who influences the way all humanity reacts to its image in our collective mirror. That potential is my dream. So I decided to write you this long, long, letter.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Janovy, Jr
    Release dateJun 2, 2020
    ISBN9780463162286
    Letter to a Child Born Today
    Author

    John Janovy, Jr

    About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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      Book preview

      Letter to a Child Born Today - John Janovy, Jr

      Letter to a Child Born Today

      Copyright © 2020 John Janovy, Jr.

      Smashwords edition

      Ashley is not the real name of the individual to whom this letter was written. However, she and her contemporaries have been the subject of many discussions that started with climate change, the election of various individuals, for example Donald J. Trump, and the appointment of other individuals to positions of power, individuals whose names may have already passed into oblivion because they didn’t parrot the president’s words and declarations. Except for chapters 1, 2, 6, and 8, images that head up each chapter are from various items in our home or photographs I have taken.

      Cover image is number 784608 by Tawny van Breda from pixabay.com, free for commercial use without attribution; that same image is used for chapter 2. Images for chapters 1 and 6 are also from pixabay.com, WikiImages, free for commercial use without attribution.

      Thanks to my wife Karen for her (very!) careful reading of the manuscript. She also did the image for chapter 8.

      ISBN: 9780463162286

      *****

      A Note to Ashley’s Parents:

      Congratulations on the birth of your child. When I scanned the paper this morning, as always, I noted the public records—births, deaths, fire and police calls—and your newborn daughter’s name caught my eye for reasons I may try to explain later. I thought about that name, her name, for those unexplained reasons, all the way downtown to my office. Later that morning, when I sat down in my usual place at a local Starbucks, with Grande dark roast, laptop, and two pieces of chocolate, that morning of March 21, 2018, I was so frustrated and fearful of the times that I was simply unable to write my usual page or two of whatever project was underway. Those public records, especially the births, had made some kind of an impression, an unusual impression, probably because of what else was in that newspaper. That’s when I decided to write Ashley a letter, one that would be as long as it needed to be, so that I could envision the life of a child born that day, if that child lived as long as I had lived by March 21, 2018.

      We’re never likely to meet. It’s taken me a couple of years, plus some months, to finish this letter, so your daughter is now older, talking, running, playing, happily, I hope. Lots of things happened during those two years, and as a result, I had to talk about them, even as Ashley is in her terrible twos, but I’m still pretending it’s about 9:30 on the morning of March 21, 2018, only with a vision of the future; her future, and the future of everyone else born that day. It’s a strange experience trying to write from the perspective of her birthday but unable to ignore the things that are happening as she grows, things she will remember when she is my age, eighty-two, but two years younger when I started this letter.

      I hope you’re okay with my letter to your newborn daughter. I also hope your lives turn out to be as rich and rewarding as mine has been. You are not only welcome and encouraged to read what I’ve written to a young child, your young child, whom I do not know and have never seen. These are challenging times to have a very young child and contemplating a future, but throughout human history, at least the recorded part, the unchallenging times have been few and far between. Good luck with Ashley and her siblings if she has some; all of you will need it in the next eighty years.

      John Janovy, Jr.

      May, 2020

      *****

      Contents

      A Note to Ashley’s Parents, v

      1. Welcome to the World,

      2. Your Birthday

      3. The Things You’ll Remember

      4. Those Notes in the Family Bible

      5. Your Friends and Neighbors

      6. Your Enemies

      7. Your Pets

      8. What You’ll learn in School

      9. The Words that will Affect your Life

      10. Your Final Days on Earth

      About the Author

      Return to Table of Contents

      1. Welcome to the World

      Look at that dot.

      —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

      Welcome to the world, Ashley! I read in this morning’s paper that you were born last night, a girl, five pounds, ten ounces. Trust me, the next few days are going to be interesting, as are the next few months, years, and decades. The last year, however, has been especially interesting, to historians a couple of hundred years from now, that is, so I decided to write you this letter. I have no idea, really, who you are, who your parents are, whether they can afford you, or whether your mother had good pre-natal care and good advice while she was carrying you inside her. To me you’re just another human being, one of the seven or eight billion other humans now walking the face of Earth. But like those other 360,000 babies born today, you have the potential to be a great artist, a great musician, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, the head of some multibillion-dollar company, a famous actor, a poet, a writer who influences the way all humanity reacts to its image in our collective mirror. That potential is my dream. So I decided to write you this long, long, letter. Trust me, in twenty years, if you are still alive, you’ll read it and maybe start writing a similar letter to someone born on March 21, 2038.

      Why would some stranger decide to write a book-length letter to a newborn child that he does not know? That’s a good question, but one with at least a couple of answers. First, the world into which you were delivered is in a mess, and most of that mess can be blamed on people, of which you are now one. But it’s that potential, mentioned above, that makes me write this letter. Your life will pass far more quickly than you will ever realize until you are old, looking back on what happened during your time as a living, breathing, individual person on Earth. My hope is that when that time comes, you will not be saying I could have been, but instead, will be saying I did my best, I tried my hardest, I used the abilities I was born with, and given to me by my parents, to help make the human experience a noble one.

      And what did you try to accomplish? You gave some serious thought to what makes a human being live an interesting and productive life and decided that you would use your time on Earth to provide that kind of a life not only for yourself and your loved ones, but also for those you never knew, and could not know, personally. Why would you try to accomplish this last feat? Why would you wish to deliver life, liberty, health, a living wage, and the pursuit of happiness to strangers? The answer to that question is very simple, and the quicker you learn it the better: We are a social species; we function best in a group that learns the lessons of its history, acknowledges what the scientists tell us about our environment, accepts the diversity present within our population, lives by the rule of law, assesses whether our laws really function in ways that are beneficial to society, and behaves in a generally rational way. Sounds simple; right? Trust me again on this one, it’s not so simple, especially when you add religion to the mix of driving factors.

      The second reason I’m writing you this letter is that I’ve spent the past sixty years studying animals that are tiny, dumb, uncooperative, but truly beautiful, at least under the microscope. In other words I was a biologist, a scientist. To be honest, many of the traits that I saw in these animals, I came to see also in my fellow humans. That vision turns out to be the burden of someone who studies animals, and teaches about animals, in order to make a living. In other words, if you are a professional biologist, and every day you focus on tiny, dumb, uncooperative organisms, trying to learn something about them, then every crowd starts looking like that menagerie revealed by your microscope. Crowds at athletic contests, concerts, political events, protests, graduations, and waiting in airport terminals start resembling nothing so much as a seething mess of highly diverse organisms bumping into one another, fighting for space, sucking up common resources, and looking for mates. Yes, it’s true. So if you want to avoid viewing your fellow humans as tiny, dumb, uncooperative animals, stay away from microscopes.

      On the other hand, microscopes can be considered as a model for all kinds of technology and education. Even with a toy one, you can pluck a hair out of your head and look at that single hair magnified a hundred times. As a result of this simple childhood exploration, you’ll sit back and think about what you’ve just seen and inevitably say to yourself: I look different through this lens than I do when I’m brushing my teeth and watching myself in the mirror. What you thought was a toy alters your own sense of who you are just because you did something you thought was play—pull out that hair and look at it magnified a hundred times. So now you’re looking at everything you do magnified a hundred times, and before long you’re looking at all of the rest of the world, including its people, magnified a hundred times, and you’re seeing things that others, those without a toy microscope, cannot see and maybe cannot be convinced that what they cannot see is actually true.

      So one of my goals is to help you see things that others cannot, or will not see. I’ll use my own birth and my early childhood memories as an example, mainly because that birth was right before the United States entered World War II, the defining event of the previous century, and those memories are mainly about post-War Oklahoma, during a time that we sometimes consider the ideal representation of our great nation’s finest hours, and in a place that was crawling out of the Great Depression, helped along by a college sports team.

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