The Good Old Days

It’s December 11th, 2021 as I write this. We’re all trying to remember life before the pandemic — the first in our lifetime — and trying to get our heads around what seems to many of us to be a world that has turned… what is the word? Oh yes. Crazy.

To try to bring some context to today’s headlines, I thought I’d look back at this date 20 years ago. It was three months after the attacks of 9-11. We were still feeling unified, though the politicians were going back to their natural partisan ways. We wondered if Christmas shopping was safe. A lot of people weren’t traveling by air, but Richard Reid did, and tried to blow up his shoe.

Back then some people still thought China was a good citizen of the world, and they were welcomed to the World Trade Organization. Many people now see them differently.

In 2001 the acronym LGBTQ didn’t have a Q, and in fact it hardly had a T. The discussions about how many genders there are hadn’t made it into society yet, other than the stodgy old default answer of “two.” The only personal pronoun issue revolved around the Mrs./Miss/Ms question.

Also, 20 years ago, many people still felt like it was okay to download “free” music. Facebook was mostly only used by college students. You couldn’t get kicked off of Twitter for having an unpopular (according to Twitter management) opinion, because Twitter didn’t yet exist. Amazon was primarily an on-line book store.

You had to take a cab, because Uber was eight years away. You could, however, look up things like that on Wikipedia, which started in 2001. So did I-Tunes. AOL was still a big deal.

It’s hard to remember, but I think 20 years ago today a lot of people were feeling down, because of 9-11, and because of the hit our economy took in its aftermath, not to mention the military action in Afghanistan. Today we have the on-going pandemic to keep us emotionally and economically down. We also have a troubling erosion of freedom of speech that makes people afraid to speak up about some topics for fear of being, “canceled.”

It makes a person wonder if there will be a Facebook or Twitter 20 years from now. Maybe Amazon will grow so large that it explodes into white light.

It’s hard to imagine that societal change can continue at the pace it’s been moving. Maybe, 20 years from now, we’ll look back in disbelief at what is happening now, or remember these times as “the good old days.”