| On eras and their ends |
[May. 12th, 2011|03:20 am]
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This American Life has a story on college students' celebrations of Osama Bin Laden's death. The gist of the piece was that these "millennials" have little memory of a time before 9/11; killing Osama took out their lifelong boogeyman. A student interviewed for the piece talked about her sister, who was in utero on Sept. 11, 2001, and would never know the fears she'd lived with for the last decade.
Nor, the piece implied, could we old folks understand. "It happened to us," one student said, in a statement of youthful narcissism with a grain of truth; for us, 9/11 was the beginning of a "new normal". For them, it's been just "normal."
But as I was listening, it dawned on me that I did get it. I got it because when I was that age, I was watching kids my age dance on top of the wall that split Berlin and the world into mutually hostile halves. I had never known a time without the threat of the communist menace and nuclear annihilation. In 1989, or certainly by 1991, I knew that my hypothetical kids would never know that fear. I liked the thought.
Forty-odd years before that, our grandparents' generation breathed a satisfied sigh, because the horrors of world war and the crushing despair of the Great Depression would never be visited on their children. They responded by having a staggeringly huge number of them.
The observation that this has happened before is followed, sadly but inevitably, by the realization that it will happen again. The Baby Boomers had a seemingly endless war and the looming dread of the draft, fears they escaped in a flood of sex and drugs. My generation had no draft and wars that were over in time for halftime at the next Super Bowl, but the sex and drugs would kill you. There was scarcely a decade between the fall of the Communist menace and the rise of the jihadist one.
The death of Osama bin Laden is not, of course, the end of terrorism. We knew nine and a half years ago that there would be no V-T day. Terrorism would not sign an instrument of surrender on the deck of a battleship. But a clandestine burial at sea is as good a place as any we will get to draw a line across the years, to say to the next generation, you, thank the gods, will never know what it was like. You will, no doubt, have your own fears, but you will not inherit ours.
One warm night, twenty or thirty years from now, I will be listening to a This Venusian life neurocast on my iPons cerebral implant. Iraglass 3.0 will interview a college-age kid. And she will be rejoicing because her children will never know the fear of rampaging zombie hordes. |
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| Comments: |
not zombies, everyone knows it is the Cylons that will kill us, I saw it on the TV. Zombies are less of a symbol of our own arrogance at trying to play God, yada yada...
When the boomers are gone, who will be the center of attention at all times? Sure won't be Gen X.
What an extremely well-written post.
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notgruntled
