Monthly Archives: March 2020

Anyone who was a latchkey child growing up in the 80s (which was pretty much all of us) can tell you some stories about the the heavy anti-drug messaging that saturated the airwaves every weekday afternoon. No sooner would you let yourself into an empty house, pour yourself a mixing bowl full of Cookie Crisp cereal and turn on the television then you would be bombarded with Scott Baio, Drew Barrymore, Corey Feldman and Tatum O’Neal all exhorting you to “Just Say No.” (Ironically, it turned out that many of those actors were merely trying to make sure there would be enough drugs left for themselves.)

This was some serious low-quality edutainement, and after school specials like “The Boy Who Drank Too Much” and PSAs like “This is your brain on drugs” became as much a part of our 80s collective memory as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises ever did. But perhaps no message is better or more fondly remembered then the 1987 PSA where a teenage boy, confronted by his father holding his weed stash out to him and demanding to know, “Where did you learn this stuff? Who taught you to do this?” sullenly snaps back, “I learned it from watching you, okay? I learned it from you!”

I’ve been thinking of this PSA a lot this week as the internet, ever ready to point its bony finger of shame at someone, has unleashed its full fury and scorn at the college students merrily partying away on the beaches of Florida (at least until they were closed down).

“How could you?” the internet demanded, holding out photographic evidence of girls in bikinis riding on boys’ shoulders while their friends all took turns drinking out of the same beer bong. “Think about your grandparents!” the internet pleaded. And then the internet wondered how all those Gen Zers got to be so collectively callous. Right before the internet sat on its couch and started flipping through its extensive collection of “participation trophy” memes.

Here’s the thing: I’m not Gen Z or a Millennial, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the frustration being experienced by these generations. Frustrations that sometimes manifest as a seeming complete lack of empathy for the generations that came before them. You think their “Ok, Bye Boomer,” jokes about the pandemic are callous? How do you think they felt about all of your “avocado toast” jokes when they told you they were drowning in student debt, medical debt, housing insecurity, and all the anxiety that accompanies those things? You told them they didn’t deserve a living wage, and now you can’t understand why they might feel as if you don’t deserve to live. And before you say, hang on, I never said anything like that: every vote you made, or didn’t make, told them all that and more.

The shocker isn’t that there are members of the younger generations who don’t seem to care about what happens to their elders—it’s that there are any who do. Remember, this is the generation who watched their classmates die by gun violence and were met with a collective shrug, who marched in the streets over climate change and were told they needed to “work on their anger management issues.” Why can’t you stay home and take this seriously? I don’t know, Dad, why can’t you ever remember to bring your canvas shopping bags to the grocery store?

So maybe the next time you, and the internet, are beside yourselves staring aghast at a picture of college kids partying on the beach during a pandemic, or feel sickened by a “Boomer Remover” thread you heard about on reddit, don’t bother with asking them “Where did you learn this stuff? Who taught you to do this?” Because the answer, as you very well remember, is “I learned it from watching you, okay? I learned it from you.”

When my daughter was little, she used to watch “The Land Before Time” over and over again. And as much as I understood the reasons why—as much as I understood the safety in the familiar, the comfort of lines you know being repeated over and and over like some kind of toddler Zen koan—it still drove me crazy. “Try something new,” I’d push. “Your next favorite thing is just around the corner!”

How ironic is it, then, that nearly a quarter of a century later I find myself doing the exact same thing, and instead of clicking on one of the literally dozens of new shows that friends and family insist will be my “new favorite thing,” I cue up yet another episode of early season “ER.” Unfortunately, however, I’ve come to realize that Mark, Doug and Carter don’t have quite the same soothing effect on me that Ducky, Cera and Longneck had on her.

Sure the pagers, Diet Cokes and pay phones are soothing (Doctors! Waiting in line! For a pay phone!) And yes, George Clooney is dreamy in any era. But the once comforting repetition of hearing the doctors ask the nurses for a “CBC” (After a certain point wouldn’t they just take that particular test as a given? No? Carry on, then.) has dimmed somewhat by the niggling thought in the back of my head saying “I wonder how much that is going to cost?”

True, the writers of “ER” did make an effort to address the cost of healthcare even back in their day. When Carter has to work on a famously prickly cardiologist’s patient and orders every test he can think of just to be on the safe side, the nurse is aghast. “That’s two thousand dollars worth of tests!” she gasps. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on the couch sighing like I’ve just seen a young Mickey Rooney offer to shine someone’s shoes for a nickel. “Two thousand dollars,” I think. “For a trip to the ER. How quaint.”

The hard truth is that in 1994, when “ER” premiered, health care costs in the United States were already ridiculous—and they have nearly quadrupled since then. This even as life expectancy rates have fallen—we are now 35^th in the world for longevity.

Most of this decline is because of the skyrocketing increase in mortality among the young and the middle-aged—people in the prime “Go Fund Me” years of their lives. Sure, a significant percentage of this increase is due to “deaths of despair” like suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related diseases, but we can’t overlook the fact that many of these deaths are due to exclusively financial reasons—for too many people, the cost of treatment is an insurmountable barrier. And by insurmountable, I mean insurmountable like Everest, with the accompanying body count to prove it.

Take insulin, for example. There is absolutely no question that without it, diabetics will die. Which is why Dr. Frederick Banning gave away the patent for free after he and his team developed it in 1922, and why, in almost every single first world country, its price is kept affordably low. (Sometimes I like to imagine Banning’s ghost one day coming back to punch America’s greedy drug manufacturers in their collective dicks. It’s a comforting thought whenever you are on hold with your insurance company.)

Now, of course, the ridiculous and insurmountable cost for many is going to be the test for Covid 19. Or will it? I’d like to think that, finally, those in charge will step in and fix our broken system—and not just because, unlike with diabetics, and insulin, they have figured out that they, too, are at risk when everyone doesn’t have access to basic healthcare, but rather because they all have some kind of Scrooge-like awakening and finally realize that it is the right thing to do.

But then again, I might be a little naïve. After all, I can still be made happy just by watching George Clooney speak on a cell phone bigger than his head.