I would like to thank all those who sent cards and happy birthday wishes for my April Fools birthday last week.

This blog post is about the changes that have happened since I was born in 1942.

In 1942 there were no vaccines to protect people from polio (which I had and which kept me at home for two years convalescing) and a bunch of other horrid diseases like measles, smallpox, rubella and malaria. Medical technology is now vastly better. And we are living a lot longer. My life expectancy was 62.6 years when I was born. (For African American men it was 55.) I am still kicking at 84 and hopefully have a few more years left to squeeze the last drops out of the lemon. A male born in the United States today has a life expectancy of 76.5 years though if Kennedy’s anti vac policies stay around long, that is likely to go down.
And there are a lot more of us Homo sapiens living on the planet. The population of the United States was 135 million in 1942. In 2026 it is just under 350 million. In 1942 the population of the world was 2.3 billion. In 2026 the estimate is 8.3 billion. (All numbers are from AI.) For many years population experts warned that the maximum number of humans that the planet could accommodate was about where we are now. Now that we have reached over 8 billion people the experts have increased the maximum, supportable world population to around 10 billion people.

So much has happened in technology over the past 84 years that was never envisioned. In 1942 there were no jet planes, no television sets, no digital phones, and most people with telephones had party lines. My family did. There was no internet, no WIFI, no Facebook or other social media, no electric cars, no high-speed trains, no giant screen high-definition television with hundreds of channels, and there was very limited air-conditioning—at least not in Nashville where I was born. We sweltered every summer until the mid 50s when air conditioning became more affordable. For relief, people went to swimming pools or to movie theaters where air conditioning had been in use since the late 1930s.

There was nothing called “artificial intelligence.” There were no Tech Bro billionaires, no satellites, and no idea that humans could ever land on the moon. And in 1942 no one had ever heard of Chuck Barry, the Drifters, Fats Domino, Elvis, the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez or Simon and Garfunkel. The R&B and folk revolutions did not begin until the early 50s.

And ironically, although household incomes were much lower then—only about $2,500 compared to about $80,000 today (adjusted for inflation the 1942 median income would amount to around $50,000 today), the disparity between those with high incomes and the very poor was less pronounced when I was born than it is now. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has expanded from around 20-to-1 in the 1940s through the 1960s to nearly 300-to-1 now. There were no billionaires in the United States in 1942 even adjusting for inflation. There are almost 1,000 today. Plus, the cost of living has greatly outpaced incomes. Although nominal incomes have increased more than 40-fold since 1942, the median home price in 2025 is roughly 5 times the median household annual income, compared to roughly two times income in the late 1940s and 1950s. Another huge factor is that today both husband and wife tend to have full time jobs. That was the case for only 10 percent of the households in 1942. It is over 50 percent today.

And how society has changed in other ways! Racism was very much alive in the United States. In the South where I grew up in Nashville Jim Crow ruled the land in 1942. Public schools were segregated as were restaurants, hotels, public facilities, most churches, swimming pools and social clubs. The Civil Rights Movement and Civil Rights legislation began to level the playing field starting in the 1960s, and many people of color now have good jobs and leadership roles in the government and the private sector. Disparities in incomes between White and Black people have lowered although they still prevail. Black families in the U.S. have incomes approximately 36% lower than White households, with median incomes of $56,000 and $92, 000 respectively. This income disparity is accompanied by a severe wealth gap, with White households holding over six times more wealth than Black households in 2025.

And in 1942 such words as “feminism,” “political correctness,” “DEI,” “Black Lives Matter” and “woke” were not yet in anyone’s vocabulary.

(One of the things I am most proud of is organizing and leading a civil rights march in Charlotte in 1964, my senior year at Davidson, and working with Embry and fellow Union Seminarians in SNCC–the most radical civil rights organization at the time–in 1966 registering voters in Southwest Georgia.)

Very few women worked full time and even fewer had management positions in 1942. Today the work force is 47% female compared to 37% in 1942. More women than men now graduate from college. A much higher percentage of women now have good paying jobs in 2026 compared to 1942 and many have high level positions in government and in the private sector.

In 1942 the United States was engaged fully in World War II joining with the Allies led by the United Kingdom. Without our involvement, today we could all be speaking German. Our main enemies then were Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan. These countries are now our friends. Russia, an alley in 1942, is now an adversary as is China, which was still in turmoil in 1942.

The United States was the champion of the free world in 1942. Today, we are on the precipice of another world war. Our president is threatening actions against Iran which constitute war crimes and which could lead to global destabilization.

There were no nuclear weapons in 1942 but there were two in 1945, both dropped by us on Japan. We are also now sitting on over 5,000 nuclear weapons, about the same number that Russia has. And there are now seven other countries with these weapons including China and North Korea. The number of total nukes has gone way down from what it was during the Cold War following the collapse of the Soviet Union and arms negotiations in the 1980s and 90s, but it only takes one nuke to ruin your day; and in the event of a world-wide nuclear holocaust, there are enough nukes in the world to end civilization as we know it along with human life on the planet.

The biggest difference may be what we humans have done and are doing to our planet. From the late 1970s, temperatures have risen sharply. The ten warmest years on record have all occurred in the most recent decades and the average temperature is now over two degrees Fahrenheit higher than in the early 1940s. Total global sea level has risen about 8–9 inches (21–24 cm) since 1880, with a major portion occurring since 1950, and current rates reaching nearly 4 mm per year. That may not sound like a lot but if the trends continue, there won’t be many beach houses left.

We Homo sapiens have trashed the planet, destroyed animal and plant species and vast forests and have polluted lakes and rivers. The number of animal and plant species that have been lost since 1942 number into the thousands including 500 vertebrate species.

And finally, the President of the United States in 1942 was Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the best that we have had. In 2026 we have Donald J. Trump, without question the worst we have ever had, and we have had some bad ones.

Does it sound to you like we may now be in an existential age where the margin for error has shrunk vastly since 1942? It sure sounds that way to me. Our planet as we know it cannot survive another 84 years if the past trends continue unabated.

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