Things that blow my mind
There's an entire generation that grew up not recalling a time when Hugh Jackman wasn't Wolverine.
There's an entire generation that grew up barely remembering Rugrats, Dexter's Lab, the original Powerpuff Girls, and other staples of the childhood of someone my age.
There's an entire generation that has grown up with no memory of the 1990s.
There's kids in high school who don't remember 9/11 or realize how much it shaped the world they grew up in.
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I win!
Honestly, I had the same thought about one-way pagers back in, like, *1990*.
Like if you were five years old when the 90s ended how much memory of it do you have?
I have a memory of the place where my home is being dirt and rocks which can only be from 1997 because the house and yard were finished before winter 1997. Don't remember my sister being born, which is spring 1997.
Didn't become aware of years and dates and stuff until late 1999, so my memories of the nineties have no real associations with numbered years as much as landmark events and photographs. The year my brother had a blue birthday cake with gummy sharks and oreo. The winter I first went sledding. The day I learned the letter, "u".
Everything from December 1999 on, I remember pretty clearly.
Could not comprehend 9/11, why the streets were empty and everyone was crying and school stopped and we went home and then the kids older than me were afraid of airplanes. Put two and two together sometime in 2003.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I mean, by the 2002 Olympics I've figured out that there are different continents with countries with different languages that don't always get along (politics) and sometimes have wars, especially in the past, but the idea of the incident-with-the-planes-crashing-into-the-skyscrapers being on-purpose never enters my mind, especially with the shows of sympathy from the other countries at the Olympics, and it never connects with the mysterious nine-eleven that people sometimes talk about (I thought it was some kind of code that had something to do with how you call 911 in an emergency).
Anyway, the next day, some choir students sang "God Bless America" over the PA system, in E-flat major (which is now its canonical key for me because of that).
I had just been playing/watching someone play Chrono Trigger, so this event felt like discovering the Day of Lavos video -- basically, the sudden realization that there is a much larger context to one's life than the day-to-day events and immediate conflicts that may characterize it, and that larger context can have some pretty devastating effects, so one has to keep those in perspective while dealing with issues immediately around oneself.
Several years down the road I picked up a recording of Howard Stern berating this woman who claimed to be pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and generally liberal-leaning, but being skeptical of John Kerry just because she didn't trust him to be tough on terrorism.
I remember punching the off switch on the television to make it go away because it Was Not Right that Dad was crying. Felt like the world was ending, like something had broken. My brother is hugging Dad and crying, and my mom is crying into the phone. "It's just a show", I say. "Back to bed".
Things seem to proceed normally, if slowly and sadly, from there, until it's time to go to school. Strangely, the next-door neighbor cousins aren't coming with my brother and I to the bus stop, and there doesn't seem to be anybody coming at all. There's not even joggers on the street. The Bus comes late and it's almost empty, for the first time ever I get to sit in the back of the bus. I look out the window and the world seems so empty.
None of my classmates have any idea what is going on. We build twin towers out of blocks and knock them down, until the teacher tells us to stop and never do that again.
School gets out amazingly early, but when I get home I can't go to any of my friends' or cousins' houses to play. I don't remember the rest of the day. Also, there are flags on every yard I see on the bus-ride home.
Really, I only remember the parts that were different from other days. Those parts are incredibly vivid, but anything that wasn't out if the ordinary just blends with every other day. So, really, I remember about four or five hours of inexplicable sadness, emptiness, and the world being broken. After that I probably played with toys or read Captain Underpants or something.
then i got home and mom was talking about it, and i was like "yeah i saw that on the TV" and she was surprised they let second graders watch
i remember a few months later we started doing the pledge of allegiance, i would quietly mock it and/or pretend to go along with it. gave me the damn creeps it did.
Obviously part of this is not being American; I'd heard about terrorist attacks in other countries before so why was this one different? But actually I suspect I'd have had a similar reaction had something like it happened in Canada. The idea that certain things Don't Happen Here even though they may happen Over There had not really sunk in yet.
I think it was a year later, when we had a class discussion on the first anniversary, that I kind of actually understood the significance of the whole thing.