I saw a short collage on TV about the day when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and I got to thinking about the defining moments of history that we have experienced. Though technically we were alive both when Mandela was released, but it doesn't really count unless you were old enough to realize what was going on.
For me that timeline started with the millennium shift, followed by 9/11. Then there's the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq. The tsunami in 2004, the earthquake on Haiti, Fukushima and Breivik. So what I'm wondering is; when does the good stuff happen?
My grandmother is old enough to remember World War II, and how much better everything got after it ended. She told me about the first time she ever saw a banana. Our teachers and parents like to talk about the Berlin wall, and what that day meant to them.
The Arab spring is the first good news that's happened in my lifetime, and it's still very uncertain whether anything good will come of it. But at least there's hope...
5 comments:
This is more a gradual shift, but - we have gotten a _lot_ better at treating cancer during our lifetime. When we were really young it was basically a death sentence, and while it's still a very lethal disease, today a lot of people are cured.
Same with HIV, and it's great, but a gradual change doesn't qualify my definition of "defining moment".
Sadly, good stuff usually happens gradually. Destroying stuff is done very quickly, but positive change usually takes hard work, and hard work takes time.
The royal wedding and the birth of Estelle was pretty cool I think.
Yeah, but those feel more like milestones; they happen at kinda even intervals - like the Olympic Games or the World Cup. But they are unlikely to be remembered as a DEFINING MOMENT of History in a hundred years.
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