In cribbage, a ‘nineteen hand’ is an impossible hand. It’s also, commonly, the term for a hand that makes zero points. Now, I’ve never played cribbage, but I feel like turning nineteen in 2020 is life’s equivalent of an impossibly unlucky ‘nineteen hand’.
Sure, there have always been bad times to turn nineteen. In Vietnam, for one, the average age of the combat soldier was (n-n-n-n-)nineteen, as Paul Hardcastle has told us. And obviously, as a young person, I’m much less likely to be seriously affected by the coronavirus than someone aged ninety (although, if I do get a bad case of covid, medical research suggests I’ll be feeling the effects of it for the rest of my life).
But I’ve been thinking about the number nineteen nonetheless, prompted by the cosmic coincidence of ‘Covid-19’ spreading worldwide in the year of my nineteenth birthday, and it’s led me in many directions.
Firstly, it’s led me backwards; nineteen years ago, two planes crashed into the world trade center, and set the tense, media-inflated, conspiracy-theory-heavy tone for global politics in the 21st century. Nineteen years ago, in Bradford, the place I was born, racial tensions reached a boiling point, and an estimated 1000 young people attacked police, businesses, and firebombed a recreational centre.
Thinking about the Bradford riots brought me to thinking about the continued racial tensions erupting this year, over the death of George Floyd. There’s a real contrast in energy between the two movements: while the Bradford rioting was a largely destructive event, resulting in £7 million of damages, recent protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful (even socially distanced), and have sparked international conversations about systemic racism in all areas of society. In America, recent celebrations of ‘Juneteenth’ - the 19th of June, an annual celebration of the emancipation of black people - have been inspiring displays of unity and solidarity.
Nineteen, for me, is an age of political awakening. It’s a time where adulthood looms large - only one more year until I’m no longer even a teenager - and as such it’s the time to understand what kind of world I’m walking out into.
And what kind of world is that exactly?
Well, immediately it’s an uncertain one. Universities, while doing their hardest to keep open and accommodate their students, are getting vaguer and vaguer in their forecasts of campus life. As someone hoping to start this year, the emails I’m getting about ‘virtual sessions’ and ‘flexible teaching’ are creating the impression that I may be paying for a course I’m going to learn mostly in my own house. And with all the ‘whack-a-mole’ going on, it’s going to be pretty difficult to settle into any kind of routine.
Even if I get the full on-campus experience, it’s likely the course won’t be nearly as strong as it was last year: some universities are laying off staff with temporary contracts, who would usually help to diversify the range of research interests in the university.
So maybe I don’t go to university. What does my world look like?
A planet of job-seekers, it seems. Young people are expected to be battered hardest by the economic fallout of the Covid-19 crisis, as we’ll be competing with those who already have qualifications but have been made redundant in whichever crashing sector they were previously involved in. It’s expected that, for a large number of young people, graduating university will be their only hope of finding a career.
Uni it is then.
Beyond my personal bubble, there are other realities I need to face as I make my way through the jagged, arid terrain of 2020. I look to Amazon, Facebook and YouTube, three dominant forces in youth culture and world politics, and I see echoes of a book I studied in college: Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book’s title has been bandied around and abused over the years, but having heard Shoshana Zuboff’s warnings about surveillance capitalism, I cannot compare these companies with anything else (although Ken Liu has written a great short story on the subject). And with Apple and Google launching Covid-tracking apps that force users to turn on their locations, Covid-19 has only exacerbated the Orwellian aspects of our age.
I look at, and am astounded by, the apathy of elderly leaders, watching Donald Trump play golf while a global catastrophe whirls around him, safe in the knowledge that his golf courses are being rescued by overseas taxpayers, evidently more concerned with celebrating in the nineteenth hole than digging his economy out of the rough.
I look at all the teenagers in America, younger than myself, who murder their own classmates in brutal rampages, as depicted in Jodi Picoult’s bestseller Nineteen Minutes.
I realise two things: the first is that, yet again, I’m doomscrolling. The second is that number nineteen is popping up in all the worst places. And both are going to remain issues for as long as I’m alive.
Pursuing the number nineteen takes me from the past, through the present, to the future.
More than anything, what terrifies me as a nineteen year old is climate change. Young people around the world agree, leading protest efforts against the destruction of our planet; one of the most prominent campaigners in the world is a 17-year-old girl. It’s a cliché to say by now, but it’s going to be us who feel the full force of impending climate catastrophes.
When I first drafted this article, I had made a direct link between CO2 emissions and the number 19: according to the Worldometer website, there had been more than 19 billion tonnes of CO2 spurted into the atmosphere this year. But that number is rising so quickly that, come the second draft, it’s beyond 20 billion.
Since the scale of the data is moving too quickly for me to write about, I’ll turn to a more eternal reference point: poetry. Shakespeare’s 'Sonnet 19' has expressed the ravaging effects of climate change far more eloquently than any statistics - and he didn’t even know it was possible. Simply replace the word ‘Time’ with the word ‘Humanity’ and you’ve got yourself a potent outburst of climate grief and a lamentation on animal cruelty.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets…
Coincidentally, our other major British poet, John Milton, has also written a ‘Sonnet 19’ that speaks to our times, this one even more immediately. Its famous opening line (‘When I consider how my light is spent’) could just as easily read ‘When I consider how my lockdown’s spent’, with the poem itself asking the same question we've all been asking ourselves: am I doing enough with my time? Should I be using the lockdown to do something more constructive? Maybe I could learn a language or take up running (or, in Milton's case, use my 'Talent which is death to hide')?
The ever-quoted conclusion to this poem, that ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’, strikes the perfect line here (particularly now that standing and waiting are much more dominant in our shopping lives. They also serve those who stand and wait at the back of the socially-distanced queue); and it's an infinitely more reassuring articulation of stay-at-home policy than our own government’s ‘Stay Alert’ slogan.
Which brings us back to 2020.
So, after all that, what does it mean to be nineteen in 2020? Is the number defined by its history, its current meanings, or its associations with the future? Is nineteen merely a number, of little consequence in the infinite line of other digits to be paying attention to? What about 20 in 2020? Is that too much 20?
For me, nineteen is everything. It’s everything wrong with the world, and it’s all the hope contained within.
Adele covered a Bob Dylan song, ‘Make You Feel My Love’, on her album 19. The penultimate verse reads:
The storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain't seen nothing like me yet
Storms are certainly raging, and the seas will continue rolling. To avoid ‘the highway of regret’, those making the highways should ask themselves ‘Should I give up, or should I just keep making pavements, even if it leads nowhere?’
But the winds of change, conjured by climate activists the world over, spearheaded, proudly, by my generation, will just get wilder.
You ain’t seen nothing like us yet.
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