Where Were You?

 

Today is 9-11. Everyone remembers where they were on this day in 2001. It is one of the great inflection points in modern history, a day on which the world changed. Before 9-11, Muslim terrorism was not a thing. There was no Department of Homeland Security. Boarding a plane or crossing the US border was a relatively simple process. There were not metal detectors everywhere.

I have seen the argument recently that 9 – 11 inspired the new aggressive atheism. It gave many the ides that religion, or “extremism,” or believing in anything, was the root of all evil.

It also threw globalism in to reverse. Opening all doors to foreign influence and foreign cultures turned out to mean something more than a wider selection of restaurants and colourful ethnic dances in the multiculturalism festival.

And of course it led to a generation of war, in Afghainstan and Iraq. 

I noticed that before 9-11, everyone was opposed to honouring soldiers and the military. After 9-11, soldiers were heroes.

What other such inflection points have there been in my own lifetime?

The first one has to be the Kennedy assassination. That seemed like the death of an era in which America was universally admired. Europe had messed up badly, but America was the great hope. The war was won, we had defeated the dragon. Sure, there was the Soviet Union, and the overhanging threat of nuclear war. But we at least had confidence in who the angels were, and who the devils were, and some evidence that angels win in the end. 

The Kennedy assassination ended all that. Evil had won after all.

One almost immediate result was the death of the folk boom. Folk music was too innocent, optimistic, and socially engaged. In came the angrier and more self-centred electric music, the Beatles and the Stones and Blonde on Blonde. In came the drugs and the idea of turning on and dropping out: we gave up on “the system” and trusting authorities.

The other great inflection point was the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1989. Although this was mostly a symbol for the more drawn-out collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The bipolar world we had taken for granted was suddenly gone. People rather absurdly declared the “end of history.”

Lesser inflection points are perhaps the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980, corresponding with the release of the Iran hostages; that is certainly an event burned into my memory. Perhaps by the same token the election of Trump in 2016. Perhaps the election of Pope Francis in 2013; perhaps that of John Paul II in 1978. Perhaps the War in the Falklands, which established Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady and signalled the returned vitality of Britain. 

And perhaps too, although it was a couple of years instead of a day, the Covid pandemic. People any more tend to date things pre-Covid or post-Covid, the way they used to date things either pre-9/11 or post-9/11.