It’s the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Just a few years ago, high school teachers could have their students write about what they were doing and how they felt the day the planes hit the World Trade Center. An article in today’s paper suggests that’s no longer the case; too many students have no memory of the event.
(You know I love this “national memory” stuff. See here, here and here.)
Our oldest just left for college. He was born after Ronald Reagan retired, and, historically speaking, thinks of Reagan about the same way he thinks of Ulysses S. Grant or Cotton Mather. Ronald Reagan. Think about that.
I’ve never actually seen an episode of Mad Men, but I’ve read enough about it to know that we astonish ourselves with our own atrocious behavior from just forty years ago. The changes in how we think and what we consider acceptable are dramatic. It’s another reminder of what my college history teacher told us—If Myles Standish walked into the room today, we would relate to him about the way we would relate to an alien from another planet.
Just for fun, I made a quick (and hardly comprehensive) list of some of the significant cultural changes that have occurred ever-so-gradually but oh-so-definitively in my lifetime, starting with “Made in Japan.” When I was young, that meant shlock—those little "Chinese" finger-sleeve “handcuffs” (but made in Japan) you’d buy in a museum store, and transistor radios where the knobs fell off. Now, we see Japan as leading the world in quality, and there’s barely a manufacturing process in America that doesn’t use Kaizen and a host of Japanese process tools.
Meanwhile, “Cadillac” was the best you could be when I was little, and that’s hardly the case today. Oh, and we loved to “drink the Koolaid” on a hot summer day, something that we hate to be accused of today. And speaking of brands, how and when did “Mickey Mouse,” one of the great global brands in history, come to mean what “Made in Japan” used to mean? It's a little confusing.
When I was young, every girl wanted a Barbie and said so. Now every girl still wants a Barbie but isn’t allowed to say so. (Guess there’s a little more cultural work to do.) And, of course (thinking of Mad Men now), we all went outside to get a breath of fresh air; now, going outside (especially around the entryway to an office) means holding your breath. In fact, I have an image of being very small, at a Bruins or Celtics game at the old Boston Garden, and seeing a huge cloud of smoke cascading down from the rafters. It’s so wonder any of us made it.
Sometime in the 1960s of 1970s America stopped being Christendom; in a few months I will attend a December holiday school concert with ten songs and never hear the word Christmas sung or uttered.
And complexity has skyrocketed, on our TVs, with our colas and shoes, and with our coffee. I’ll have “a regular” used to mean something at the diner; now it requires specifying coffee (i.e.--a “regular” what?), describing the desired temperature—and then it really gets complicated. In a funny twist, too, Starbucks will tell you that people tend to “own” their coffee over time and take on a kind of proprietary affection for their particular flavored latte.
Accompanying increased complexity has been our sense of how much space we need. There are a whole bunch of churches which have had to consider expansion in the last few decades, not because more people are necessarily attending, but because where six folks used to sit, only four feel comfortable now. (We're fatter, too--much fatter.) And, I’ve mentioned the size of bathrooms, bedrooms and houses in other posts. Maybe green will turn this trend around. (In fact, when I write this post again forty years from now, I’m guessing “green” will be one of the major cultural shifts, starting with bottled water.)
When I was little, a kid just a few years older was hobbled by polio. That hasn’t been a concern since Salk--and I remember sipping that vaccine and being darn glad it didn't require a needle. On the other hand, I can look out the window into the woods behind the house and worry about deer ticks and Lyme disease, and Eastern Equine Encephalitis. And maybe swine flu and bird flu and just the usual old season flu. So, in some ways we’ve come a long way, but in others not so far. (Or maybe we've come a long way but bacteria has come even further.)
Maybe, too, we sometimes go backwards. Said son who doesn’t know Ronald Reagan from Cotton Mather loves Clapton and Led Zepplin. In fact, the Beatles Rock Band came out this week, and I know more than a few 14-year-olds who are anxious to get one for Christmas. If I do the math right, this would be like me, around 1970, pining for the latest musical board game from Duke Ellington, Rudy Vallee and Guy Lombardo. In 1970, Guy Lombardo was Cotton Mather to me, if you know what I mean.
That would have been the about same year my sister was pining for Mystery Date.
It’s happening to us even as I write; we’re losing some bit of memory, shifting a cultural nuance, or having an old, venerable historical impulse overtaken by something else entirely new. It’s like a snake shedding skin.
Maybe, if we can keep 9/11 as alive as the Beatles—at least for a while--we’ll be making progress.
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