Individual lives, commn history
You know, growing up, I heard people talking about certain events of the cultural nature. There was always that question the older generations had. Where were you when Kennedy was killed? Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed? For us, there was the Challenger Shuttle in elementary school. It was the first. Most people my age or close, remember where they were and what they were doing. I'd be willing to bet that like John Lennon, some of my generation knows where they were when Kurt Cobain died. I don't. This is not to say I'm a heartless bastard, I just don't remember. I was a drunken, drug addled mess at that point, so there's a good deal I don't remember.
But, the first real one, the first big one wasn't until I was twenty-three. 9/11, changed it all though. It's a little strange, isn't it? Can you think of any other event whose entire significance is expressed simply with three numbers? 9/11. We don't even really tend to connect it with emergency contact anymore. It is all about that day now. It's become one of those strange things.
I wonder now if we're not heading toward another one of those generation defining experiences, but I don't think it's going to be as sudden. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am wrong. I wonder if we're not headed toward a kind of experience akin to the great depression. I can't tell you the number of people I know who've lost jobs in the last few months, myself included. I know people who've lost jobs, their entire savings, everything. I hope I'm wrong, but I think this is going to be another one of those things. It's not going to be a "where were you when...", but a "what happened to you when....."
9/11 did it. I'm not going to go into some maudlin exploration of how 9/11 has effected the American psyche. There are people better qualified for those things, and at this point, it's almost exploitation. Maybe it just is exploitation, no almost involved. I can't say. I'm just looking around and maybe it seems maudlin, but there's been so much going on, I really can't help but think there's an eerie similarity between the times we're living through and the sixties. In some ways, we're pushing it even further. They had Vietnam, we've got Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got a rather seriously divided populace, same as it was then. Maybe 9/11 is for us, what the assassinations were for them. I didn't live through those times,, so I guess I can't really say. What about those people who have been around long enough to have lived through all of it? The sixties, and the insanity they were, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II, the Red Scare and all of that. I mean, I remember the eighties when the communists were the bogey men. We wrote stories about them, made movies about them hiding behind every corner, and nefarious commie plots to destroy the American way of life, just because they were evil commies who hated everything American. Maybe I'm just searching for some connection between today and our past history in order to be able to put some of this in perspective to make myself feel better, to give myself some kind of feeling that I can see how it's all going to turn out for the best and we'll be stronger for it. I can't really say for sure.
I know though, we have done one thing, which is both positive and transformational. We elected our first African American president, and I can't believe my generation didn't have a good deal to do with that. We've come of age with an entirely different paradigm so far as race is concerned. It's not something I can fully express, but VA Commonwealth Senator Melvin did very eloquently, and with what to me is an admirable sincerity.
I certainly can't say that's a bad thing. Maybe so much of this seems like it's a replay of the sixties because it's time we finally start resolving some of the things left over from the sixties. I think electing not just a black president, but also a president who recognizes we've been having the same discussions and the same differences essentially since the sixties, is a great step.
I do wonder though, if we're going to come away from these times with the same twists of thought and political character as the baby boomer generation. I wonder what it's going to do to our nature as a people, and it's something which is both troubling and which is sad and painful. I think the eighties made us naive, too much prosperity with too little labor. I think there's also a good chance the baby boomer generation was trying to use the eighties to erase the past, as if all the consumption, the wealth, the ease of things for so much of the country was going to mean it was all behind them and that things were safe and secure and stable. I don't think that until the eighties and nineties, the baby boomer generation got much stability. We were lucky enough to have some relative stability, but maybe even that is a revisionist kind of history. There was The War On Drugs, MTV, the Iran Contra scandal, John Lennon's assassination, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hip Hop, Tiananmen Square, the savings and loan scandal, the government rescue which resulted from the scandal, and let's not forget, the fiscal policies leading to the proliferation to multinationals which were the foundation for where we are now. The prosperity of the eighties in more ways than not, paved the way for the troubles we've had today.
The nineties, well, those were less rocky, but still had their own ups and downs. The Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal is the first thing which jumps to mind, and Columbine, the beginning of a bizarre pattern which continues into the present. The birth of The World Trade Organization, with the accompanying protests, Mandela's release, the first Gulf War, the Web became available, Rwanda, the first terrorist attack on The World Trade Center, Dolly the sheep was cloned, the human genome project began, the Hubble telescope was launched, cell phones and DVD are introduced, reality TV makes it's first appearance (God help us all), the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Notorious BIG. Tiger Woods wins the Masters. and we can't forget the Oklahoma City bombing, committed by Americans we should remember, the incident at Wacco, the LA riots following the Rodney King trial.
In the end, I guess we're just this strange crazy race of hyper intelligent animals stumbling our way through the history of our lives, a history we have no choice in sharing. I wonder if sometimes we use the kitsch and the camp we tend to use in looking into our pasts to be able to keep some kind of distance, some kind of separation from each other to try and make sense of it. We reach further back into a history which we never actually experienced and we mythologize it. The myths hold us together because recent history nearly tore us apart.
But, the first real one, the first big one wasn't until I was twenty-three. 9/11, changed it all though. It's a little strange, isn't it? Can you think of any other event whose entire significance is expressed simply with three numbers? 9/11. We don't even really tend to connect it with emergency contact anymore. It is all about that day now. It's become one of those strange things.
I wonder now if we're not heading toward another one of those generation defining experiences, but I don't think it's going to be as sudden. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am wrong. I wonder if we're not headed toward a kind of experience akin to the great depression. I can't tell you the number of people I know who've lost jobs in the last few months, myself included. I know people who've lost jobs, their entire savings, everything. I hope I'm wrong, but I think this is going to be another one of those things. It's not going to be a "where were you when...", but a "what happened to you when....."
9/11 did it. I'm not going to go into some maudlin exploration of how 9/11 has effected the American psyche. There are people better qualified for those things, and at this point, it's almost exploitation. Maybe it just is exploitation, no almost involved. I can't say. I'm just looking around and maybe it seems maudlin, but there's been so much going on, I really can't help but think there's an eerie similarity between the times we're living through and the sixties. In some ways, we're pushing it even further. They had Vietnam, we've got Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got a rather seriously divided populace, same as it was then. Maybe 9/11 is for us, what the assassinations were for them. I didn't live through those times,, so I guess I can't really say. What about those people who have been around long enough to have lived through all of it? The sixties, and the insanity they were, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II, the Red Scare and all of that. I mean, I remember the eighties when the communists were the bogey men. We wrote stories about them, made movies about them hiding behind every corner, and nefarious commie plots to destroy the American way of life, just because they were evil commies who hated everything American. Maybe I'm just searching for some connection between today and our past history in order to be able to put some of this in perspective to make myself feel better, to give myself some kind of feeling that I can see how it's all going to turn out for the best and we'll be stronger for it. I can't really say for sure.
I know though, we have done one thing, which is both positive and transformational. We elected our first African American president, and I can't believe my generation didn't have a good deal to do with that. We've come of age with an entirely different paradigm so far as race is concerned. It's not something I can fully express, but VA Commonwealth Senator Melvin did very eloquently, and with what to me is an admirable sincerity.
Click to viewI certainly can't say that's a bad thing. Maybe so much of this seems like it's a replay of the sixties because it's time we finally start resolving some of the things left over from the sixties. I think electing not just a black president, but also a president who recognizes we've been having the same discussions and the same differences essentially since the sixties, is a great step.
I do wonder though, if we're going to come away from these times with the same twists of thought and political character as the baby boomer generation. I wonder what it's going to do to our nature as a people, and it's something which is both troubling and which is sad and painful. I think the eighties made us naive, too much prosperity with too little labor. I think there's also a good chance the baby boomer generation was trying to use the eighties to erase the past, as if all the consumption, the wealth, the ease of things for so much of the country was going to mean it was all behind them and that things were safe and secure and stable. I don't think that until the eighties and nineties, the baby boomer generation got much stability. We were lucky enough to have some relative stability, but maybe even that is a revisionist kind of history. There was The War On Drugs, MTV, the Iran Contra scandal, John Lennon's assassination, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hip Hop, Tiananmen Square, the savings and loan scandal, the government rescue which resulted from the scandal, and let's not forget, the fiscal policies leading to the proliferation to multinationals which were the foundation for where we are now. The prosperity of the eighties in more ways than not, paved the way for the troubles we've had today.
The nineties, well, those were less rocky, but still had their own ups and downs. The Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal is the first thing which jumps to mind, and Columbine, the beginning of a bizarre pattern which continues into the present. The birth of The World Trade Organization, with the accompanying protests, Mandela's release, the first Gulf War, the Web became available, Rwanda, the first terrorist attack on The World Trade Center, Dolly the sheep was cloned, the human genome project began, the Hubble telescope was launched, cell phones and DVD are introduced, reality TV makes it's first appearance (God help us all), the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Notorious BIG. Tiger Woods wins the Masters. and we can't forget the Oklahoma City bombing, committed by Americans we should remember, the incident at Wacco, the LA riots following the Rodney King trial.
In the end, I guess we're just this strange crazy race of hyper intelligent animals stumbling our way through the history of our lives, a history we have no choice in sharing. I wonder if sometimes we use the kitsch and the camp we tend to use in looking into our pasts to be able to keep some kind of distance, some kind of separation from each other to try and make sense of it. We reach further back into a history which we never actually experienced and we mythologize it. The myths hold us together because recent history nearly tore us apart.