Reference Points
Recently I was reading one of those lists you occasionally see enumerating the cultural reference points of a freshman college student. You know; the ones that are written to shock and appall the rest of us and make us feel like a bunch of gristly codgers. So today’s freshman can’t remember the Clinton administration, doesn’t know what a VHS tape is, has never known a world without the Internet, and so on.
The list got a little aggressive in one respect, guessing that today’s 18 has only vague recollections of 9/11, as something that upset the parents. At age 11? I dunno, I think that one might have stuck.
Anyhow, it got me thinking about what news stories had an impact on me in my own childhood. The earliest world event I have a distinct memory of is the Apollo 11 moon landing, when I was 5. For some reason my parents took me over to watch at my grandparent’s apartment over the nursing home they then ran. Were they apartment sitting? Did my parents not own a television at that time? Though I’m not sure of the details, I can still see the black and white image of Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the lunar surface. I dozed off and had to be jostled awake for the big moment. In fact, my memory of that place, my mental layout of its floor plan, which I visited a ton of other times, is indelibly linked to that night. It’s where we landed on the moon.
The first political story I still recall is the Nixon resignation, a couple of months ahead of my tenth birthday. I’d been aware of the Congressional hearings as an annoying interruption to afternoon kid’s programming. The resignation occurred when we were vacationing in the States, and my dad made sure to tell me that I was experiencing a historic moment as we watched on the hotel TV. Later, in high school, I became a Watergate buff.
Those are both cases of adults making sure I remembered something later. The earliest news story I remember engaging on my own was the Patty Hearst kidnapping, also in ‘74. At the time, the CBC, bless its taxpayer-funded heart, ran a news show for kids called What’s New? I can see myself watching it in my parents’ bedroom, looking at the famous image of Hearst behind the freaky hydra logo of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The Hearst story resonated with a kid’s concerns-here was this young girl who’d been taken away by bad people, and they were making her doing bad things-and the grown-ups were going to blame her for it! I also remember being confused by who the heck the Symbionese were.
