When the last of “Generation Y” (born 1980-1994) turned 13, before the last of “Generation Z” was born (1995-2009), and before all of “Generation Alpha” (2010-2014) arrived, the iPhone was part of America’s culture (2007). These generations only know a world with iPhones. But America is more than iPhones.
History – what happened before we happened – often escapes us, and never more than now. As the world speeds up, things get taken for granted that only a few years before did not exist, yet we rush on.
If this has always been so, one generation on horses and next in cars, one generation elated by the radio and next watching television, one generation in trains and next on planes, one vulnerable to infection and next enjoying antibiotics – the pace of change is changing, accelerating, and that minimizes history.
Missing is an appreciation for the process of history, how it is made, how daydreamers and night owls, those who intently imagine the impossible, are aided by freedom, free markets, courage, and experimentation, risk takers and thing makers, to create what is from what was, making dreams real.
To understand what is around us, to appreciate its origins and what is expected of us by those who did what they did to get us here, you have to stop, step outside yourself, and begin to wonder backward.
How did we get the iPhone, email, text messaging, cameras, medical monitors, calculators, flashlights, alarm clocks, electronic music, instant news, video images in real-time, online instruction, food delivered, appointments made, coffee ordered, movies, weather, modern merchandise, every odd device – and, incredibly enough, all those in one hand, anything to buy or bid, more than all the kings ever did?
The answer, in a word, is freedom – the freedom to think, dream, experiment, fail, and start again; to imagine a place where God-given rights attach to everyone and then create that place; the freedom to move from cotton gin to clothes made of recycled plastic, from paper kites to jet engines, from telegraph to telephone, from clunky computer and rocket engines that put men on the moon to a pocket full of rare earths with one million times that early in-flight computing power, what we call the iPhone.
Freedom is at the heart of the advances America calls our history, material and civil, economic and political, long and labored, hard-bitten, hallowed, and legal, so much owed to daring entrepreneurs, dogged factory workers, undaunted farmers, and unstoppable warriors – we can never pay it back.
America is not just material advances of course, or advances in the human condition, new medicines, conveniences, ways of transportation or communication, civil rights, or what we even see. America is actually – and our history also is – more about what we do not see, not what is visible but invisible.
Courage and inspiration, resilience and tenacity, faith when that is all you have, determination when that is all can win the day, love when that is the difference between saving your fellow man and not – those are what no one sees, what creates the American family, at the heart of our history.
That iPhone is about the courage shown by men who fought and those who prayed when they did, who nursed them back to health on their return home, or visited their graves and raised their children when they did not come home.
That iPhone is about Americans who died at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Cowpens, Yorktown and Valley Forge; later at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, then the Somme and Marne, beyond that Normandy, Okinawa, Iwo, or at Chosin Reservoir, Inchon, Pusan, or Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill, and Hu, later in places like Panama, Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, wherever freedom’s beachhead called.
Truth is, the iPhone is America writ small – this place, this people to whom 413 Nobel Prizes have been awarded, to Russia’s modest 30 and China’s scant eight. The iPhone is just an iteration of freedom’s reach, the latest iteration of freedom, which never comes easy, and is never preserved without a fight.
So, when young Americans wonder how lucky they are to have an iPhone – or do not wonder but should – the answer is very. They are lucky beyond the wildest dreams of most who made that miracle in their pocket possible, who dreamed, worked, fought, tried, died, and overcame, who suffered and took a stand, and appreciated freedom so they could hold an iPhone in their hand.
One last thing. What do you think they would ask of Generations Y, X, and Alpha today, before they nodded, smiled, and watched them play, before they bid them live, and let them be? Just this: That they take time to know history.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
