How a Screaming Kid on a Plane Showed Me What's Important

Have you ever been 20? Yeah, me too. But I got a reminder recently that my reaching of what we consider young adulthood didn’t have to happen in the grand scheme of things.

Honestly, I’m tired of talking about politics. The more I think about the skewed political landscape, the more it makes my skin itch and my ears ring. So this week I’m going in a more philosophical direction.

Truth is, sometimes I like to be reminded about the macro of things and step away from the micro. What reminded me was an experience that annoys most people, but in this case tripped a wire in my brain.

So I’m on a plane to LaGuardia Airport after the Thanksgiving holiday. Nothing special, just really routine, but then a woman with a baby sat down behind me. Then I saw another couple with small children, and then someone else with a baby. And all on cue, they started to cry as if they were joining a chorus of bawling.

I probably wasn’t the only one in the cabin, including the flight attendants, that sighed in unison probably thinking, “man, it’s gonna be a long flight.”

But Zen thinker that I am when I have to listen to a two-year-old scream in my ear, I began to ponder how lucky these loud ass kids were. Here they sat on an airliner with engines that could not only propel them to 10,668 meters (35,000 feet) into the air, but to speeds of 800-900 kilometers per hour (500 mph).

They had the luxury of parents who held them and tried to calm them down while giving them milk, or snacks or toys. The likelihood that the aircraft that they rode on would meet with a lethal accident was almost zero.

When the plane landed, they would also eventually exit on a cold late November day into an environment where they were protected by a thick, warm garment. In their homes, which they’d get to on paved roads, they’ll probably enjoy things like heat, incandescent light, refrigerated food, and a bunch of stupid sh*t on an iPad that their gainfully employed parents give them to shut them up for a while.

Your Point?

I’m getting to that. Eventually these brats precious children and I were separated, but while I was in their company, I thought that there was a time once when none of these things would have been possible. In fact, the chances of them living to age five almost anywhere in the world was pretty poor. The fact is most of the 117 billion people who have ever lived never made it to age 20.

According to the best data we have, as recently as two centuries ago, about 1 in every two children died before they hit puberty. Through most of human history, we foraged through the savannah looking for food and about 49 percent of children born didn’t make it. In places like Peru about 53 percent perished as kids. Even in supposed classical societies like Ancient Rome before and after the time of Christ, half the children died at an age when their peers today are driving their parents into bottles of Prozac.

I’m not seeing much data on child mortality in Africa of antiquity, but the current figures show while there’s been improvement, far too many children die on the continent due to warfare, famine and disease.

The truth is throughout history, you were lucky if you hit age 24 and that with advances in technology, organization, education and medicine – yeah vaccines – humanity has significantly increased its chances of living longer lives. Even in America, if you don’t live on a diet of fast food, alcohol, cigarettes and dope, your chances of living into your 70s and beyond are pretty good by comparison to the old world.

So those kids on the plane didn’t know it, but unlike their counterparts in 1100s Europe, they had no chance of dying of smallpox. Unlike the kids of Asia Minor 300 BC, nobody was going to raid their village and mutilate everyone who could not serve as slaves. Unlike the Northern Sahara circa 500, there’s gonna be food today, tomorrow, next week, next month and for the foreseeable future. Unlike 1850s Appalachia, even in the face of labor complications, both mother and child would probably survive.

Again, Your Point?

My point is we’ve got a good thing going here. Somehow, despite having a war within the last 90 years that killed as many as 60 million people; plus subsequent conflicts continuing to a point in which now 92 countries are engaged in war beyond their borders; the possible threat of at least one nuclear weapon exploding somewhere on the planet as the result of one of these conflicts; and a climate catastrophe that has already started and that we’ll just have to try to survive, we have managed to keep things moving.

In 1970, 1 in 4 people worldwide experienced hunger, but that’s now only 12 percent (although there’s been an increase in food insecurity). Throughout the world the literacy rate is 87 percent, and 5 billion people have internet access. With all of the things I’ve listed above it’s clear we’re at a crossroads. The planet has a choice: keep advancing through technology; keep curing and annihilating diseases; eliminate famine; create a sound standard of living for every nation; allow people and their communities to develop wealth; allocate access to resources; educate boys AND girls – or not and kiss it all goodbye within the next several generations and return to living the way we did a millenia ago.

So I know I said I was tired of talking about politics, but that’s because I’m tired of politicians and we all should be. The global focus of politicians is to either sell something to people or to take things from them. Too many are controlled by private interests, religious dogma, bigotry or all of the above. Somehow this exists in countries that call themselves “democratic.”

But these are the people who either stand in the way of progress or broker it like it was at an auction. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who thinks he's doing what's right, but is actually destroying things.

The smallpox vaccine was not developed by a monarch, bureaucrat or elected official armed with their own hubris. It was the brainchild of a physician, Edward Jenner, who in 1796 figured out that you could introduce a weakened version of a disease into the body and trigger it to fight that disease. That alone probably saved the lives of hundreds of millions unborn. But in America we are actually giving power to people who don’t understand that concept.

I Get Your Point

Let’s not be ignorant. Annoying children on airplanes are actually a sign of how far we’ve come over the last 2 million years, and of how far we can go. It’s not like I won’t be irritated and frustrated with a parent that doesn’t shove a cookie in their kids mouths. But that’s a problem that I’d rather have than returning to a day when those same kids’ chances of hitting 20 are about 50-50.

I’m not going to pretend to suggest where humanity is supposed to go from here. Maybe we all become part of a grandiose singularity in which we join with the grotesque machines we’ve managed to create. Maybe some smart apple will figure a way to get us to a duplicate planet light years away and start another branch of our species. Maybe we’ll somehow speed up evolution and find a way to live happily under the sea.

But none of it’s going to happen if we don’t get a grip on what’s important and that’s not people’s individual gripes, material wants, or petty issues. It’s having a civilization where something as mundane as a screaming kid can happen – because it can happen.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.