The New Frontier – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week on the Wednesday Blog, I try to remember a story for this week that I came up with on Saturday while lost in a parking garage.
I will usually have a few ideas for the Wednesday Blog lying around in one of several repositories, including my memory of incidents that’ve happened within the last few days or weeks that might make for curious anecdotes for this weekly publication. This Saturday, while I was getting dinner on the Plaza on my way up to my evening shift at the Kauffman Center, I thought of one such idea that at the time seemed golden for this week. For some reason, walking back down the stairs from street level to where my car was parked underground, I found myself thinking about the first line of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s opening monologue from Star Trek: The Next Generation, identical to the same line in Captain James Kirk’s monologue from the Original Series, “Space, the Final Frontier.” This idea of the frontier sticks with me because my own world here in the Midwest is so very new; where now there are tree-lined streets, parks, and fountains little more than a century ago was open prairie.
At the 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago, the American historian William Jackson Turner presented his famed Frontier Thesis, which argued that as of that moment the American frontier was well and truly closed; all land from Atlantic to Pacific was taken, bought, or occupied by some one or another. Turner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, made this point to mark 1893 as a major turning point in American history from the age when our culture was defined by the endless frontier extending far out beyond the horizon to a distant and nigh mythic Pacific Ocean and towards a new world where the United States was an island unto itself, with travel from New York to San Francisco possible in a matter of days by rail. Today, of course, the same journey can be made in about 6 hours by plane, and for much of my life I’ve heard of Alaska as the new frontier and, like the two Captains of my favorite science fiction series, Space as the final frontier.
Yet I think there’s another frontier that bears consideration, one which is far more personal to each of us. I stand today looking at my own life and childhood with a great degree of nostalgia, and especially now that I am spending my days with students who are going through those same moments, I often want to connect with them by remarking about how I was doing this or that when I was their age. Yet, it is hard for me to reconcile that these people are living out their adolescent years in the early 2010s and not the early 2000s as I did. Their world is a new frontier for me, one that is far more digital, one that is far more interconnected, and one that is in many ways far more dangerous than my own.
I’ve long thought about how different things would be if I had children for them compared to my own life. If I were to have children this year in 2023, they would be in middle school in the early 2030s and graduate high school in 2041, a full 30 years after I did. This is almost equal to the same gap that I have with my parents, yet to me the cultural and technological differences between even today in 2023 with what I knew in 2011 are in some ways far greater than what I remember being around when I was little in the mid and late 1990s that my parents lived with in their teenage and young adult years in the 1980s. It is harder for me to understand some of this generation because my experiences are far more framed in the world that existed when I was born, and as much as I look forward to the futures that this century could hold, I still feel a close connection to the century that formed my own existence.
This is all a very linear way of thinking about time and even space. It could be that echoes of moments from my own past keep appearing in my present as I experience this new period in my life. The frontier of full-time employment has been reached, and I’ve chosen for the moment to cross its threshold into whatever its potentials may hold. I look back at my life from just a few months ago with some wistful longing for the days before I was constantly needing to be my best self, the days when I had plenty of time to get all of the things I need to complete done. There are always echoes in my memory which announce themselves in the present, from the way the sunlight shines nebulously in the sky on a morning after an overnight rain to the new takes on old hymns we sang in my elementary school Masses each week. I find myself remembering the people I knew and loved in my past and see a great deal of them in those I surround myself with now.
I hope that as I move further into this new frontier I will be glad to see what it has to offer, what ideas it will inspire in me, and how I can continue to grow, hopefully, to become the person who people will remember in centuries long after I and all those around me are gone when perhaps humans will have begun venturing out from our home planet to seek their own new frontiers deep in the void of Space.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 