- By
- William Elliott Hazelgrove
The world has changed. It was
on a bright September day after all that we left one era behind
for another. It was the Titanic of our Era. For those people
the Victorian age was brought to a sinking halt with that magnificent
liners descent into the depths of the icy Atlantic. From that
moment on there was a dividing line between people dressing for
dinner and people slaughtering each other with Lewis machine
guns in the trenches of Verdun. The industrial age 
moved
in with it's sickening modernity and efficient killing and people
who could remember the Titanic looked back at an age where life
moved at a different pace.
Now we have our dividing line. Before September 11, 2001,
Madonna mattered. Bill Clinton's peccadilloes had some importance
to our national consciousness. We cared who was winning the pennant.
We were shocked over the lyrics of albums and we worried about
children with guns in our schools. Our fears were very real to
us then. How many times could Madonna take off her clothes and
how bad could the lyrics of a rap song get? But there was a curious
distance to events then. We worried about our roaring economy
slowing down and surely those new companies with their websites
couldn't be worth that much? Or could they?
There was so much money around. If you were smart then you
made money and you didn't have to even manufacture anything.
Just play the market. Sit in your basement and become a millionaire.
People rung their hands and complained that nobody was really
making anything anymore but that didn't matter. It was a new
economy. It was a new world. The brick and mortar businesses
of the past simply weren't necessary. The real question was what
to do with all that money in our 401k's. People were retiring
at forty. They were starting second careers because there was
a new thought that aging was simply aberrational. Drink more
water and eat vitamins and supplements and we will live to a
hundred. At least.
Aids was a thing of the past. We had controlled if not conquered
the disease. Cancer was on the wane and if people would just
exercise then heart disease would be a thing of the past. But
let's go to dinner. Let's buy another house. Let's start another
company and let's travel. The airlines were always booked up.
You had to give at least three months notice to get a decent
fare because the world was waiting to be seen. The cold war was
over and really we had run out of enemies. Even the Russians
admitted we had won and were dismantling their nuclear warheads
and selling us the enriched uranium for us to use so we could
generate more power for our homes, our marvelous cities, our
still unchecked dreams.
Summer was still summer. Mosquito bites were a nuisance at
best. Not much happened in the summers. News was slow. The President
left town quite a bit then. There were no major crisis. The Palestinians
and the Israelis. Castro talking down in Cuba. Distant terrorists
threats and articles describing scenarios that no one really
took seriously. The space station was being built, even if was
moving slowly. The Shuttle was nothing but a space bus and pretty
soon they 
would be selling
tickets to people the same way they sold airline tickets. The
movies were still too violent but a good action film was still
not a bad way to pass a few hours. Bruce Willis was at the top
of his form. Springsteen might tour and the Stones would never
die.
Then, out of the clear blue, one world passed for another.
There was a before and an after. Before there was a languid clear
day with pastoral breezes of late Indian Summer. After there
was the clear horror of people flying through space toward their
death. The drone of airplanes abruptly ceased and people stopped
traveling. There was a film of buildings falling that was all
the more unreal because there were actually people dying. There
were people who were swearing to kill all of us The television
went from entertainment to the harbinger of death. There were
people wandering around with placards. They were pilgrims of
Dante's inferno. There was a city called New York but you wouldn't
want to visit there. Not now. Evil surrounded us. Our cities
were deserted. We stayed in basements.
But that passed. We won wars. We destroyed the enemy. Life
returned to some sort of. semblance of normal but we were suddenly
in a new era. Our airlines had been destroyed. 401 K's were worthless.
The economy mauled. Traveling was now suspect. And terror. Terror
was in our mail. The postman could bring us death now. A Mosquito
bite, something harmless like cutting the grass could kill us.
Strange virus's had mutated into killers. We kill off one enemy
for another but everywhere we turn there seems to be something
threatening to destroy us.
Madonna who? Rock and roll. Financial freedom. Movies. So
much dribble. Slick
Willy messing around in the white house. What? If only our problems
should be so easy. We had moved from armchair into the front
line and no one had told us it was coming. Just like that the
safe old world left us. The late twentieth century bowed out
and with it went our equivalent of the fifties with our petty
concerns and our luxurious worries. Like everyone else we never
saw it coming. We remember the old world as something distant,
like faint music at dusk, something we yearn for, but can never
have again.
