With apologies to John ReedāsĀ impressive Ten Days that Shook the WorldĀ for borrowing his title. (FYI: Warren Beattyās 1981 cinematicĀ RedsĀ about the same Russian Revolution was even better.)
Anyway, around the T-Day table, it was asked what historical happenings you first remembered and where were you?Ā Those collective where were you when moments.
And wouldnāt you know it, first historical happenings are different for different age cohorts. Because each generation has its own edition of those era-defining where were you when moments.
For instance, my Gen Z sonās first world event of note was Obamaās presidential victory (4 November 2008). He remembers us all watching it as a happy family in Canada. His first historical event was followed by a string of school shootings. My Millennial daughterās first conscious event was 9/11 (2001), which she caught glimpses of while living in Santa Monica. It was followed by an endless string of school shootings. Including an up-close-and-personal lockdown on the day of her high school graduation! Fun. I sense a trend?*
My Gen X wifeās first recalled event occurred while she was having breakfast in Beverly Hills with her twin friends, Rachel and Kiefer Sutherland. It was over cornflakes that the twinās mother, Shirley, held up the Los Angeles Times revealing in bold headlines: āTricky Dickā Nixon Resigns (8 August 1974). (Note to namedrop-disapproving daughter: It wasnāt me this time, it was Brad Pittās co-star in Less Than Zero!)
As I mentioned in a previous piece, mine is a Baby Boomer classic: JFKās assassination (22 November 1963) and subsequent funeral, which I watched on our black and white TV in Windsor (nĆ©e Riverside), Canada. On the other hand, I suspect my G.I. Generation mom and dadās first big event would have probably been 21 May 1927āwhen Charles Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic flying solo. Or perhaps, 28 October 1929, the day the stock market crashed. Both events were kinda big, Iām told. They lived in interesting times.
And itās interesting to me because these initial events baptize us into the world we live. And in combination with the other noteworthy events sure to follow, help form our coping mechanisms, worldviews, and emotional foundations: Do we live in stable times or times of chaos and upheaval? Is our world safe or precarious? Are you proud or disappointed in your country? Will you be bullish or bearish, hopeful or discouraged, feel empowered or helpless? You may have heard the revered Chinese curse that cautions: May you live in interesting times. But of course, the word interesting here means times filled with tumult and uncertainty. But since no one from China knows of the ancient quotation, maybe not!?
It is also interesting because significant events seem to be happening more often. Or is it just me? Because it feels like weāre bearing witness to more significant events. And that makes me wonder if either time is elastic or what we perceive as significant is different than it used to be? Is it the media spotlight? Is our world just so much more complex? Have we succumbed to short-termism? Squirrelā¦Or maybe itās just that those 100-year floods occur every-other year now, and so too does a novel zoonotic spillover event? Is Mother Nature a trickster? I dunnoā¦
Anyways, it goes without sayingābut I must anywayāthat, of course, all the seminal moments of my life: accidents, when my kids were born, wedding days, and when my parents diedāmuch too youngāall rocked my world to varying degrees. But for this piece, I am interested in historical events, not personal milestones. So unless one of my kids makes historyāNo pressure, kids, honest!āthese are the 10 days that shook my world and the emotions that followed:
20 July 1969: Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin of Apollo 11 walk on the moon. It blew me away watching it live on the family TV in Canada. Almost unimaginable. Breathtaking, tooā¦considering how primitive CGI special effects were then and how real they made them look walking on the moon. ;)
4 May 1970: I watched the news from my living room and saw four students shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State: WTF? Shock and revulsion. Is this America? I wondered.
28 January 1986: The US Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff killing all seven crew. It was late afternoon; I was walking between Londonās Covent Garden and Leicester Square when I saw the CNN footage. This was the opposite of how I felt on 20 July 1969. My sadness was quickly followed by two things skeptical: Who screwed up? And has Americaās technological dominance just exploded before our very eyes?
9 November 1989: The day the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Ironically, I was in Eastern Europe, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (Slovenia today), to be exact. It was unimaginable. It was hopeful. My entire Spy vs. Spy Cold War intellectual foundation was shaken. Just wow!
11 February 1990: Nelson Mandela walks out of Victor Verster Prison in Cape Town. Hard to believe the Wall coming down and South Africaās apartheid regime ending months apart, but they did! It was awesome, filling me with hope. Perhaps I even wondered if peace between the Palestinians and Israel was possible. Nawā¦But a guy can dream, canāt he?
Ā 7 November 1991: Basketball legend Magic Johnson announces his retirement after testing positive for HIV. I am a huge LA Lakers fan, and Magic was a titanātaking my Lakers to the NBA finals nine times and winning five titles! I was in Hong Kong, walking home from dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui, when I heard the news. I was stunned yet oddly hopeful. Because now AIDS, the so-called gay white manās diseaseāof which Magic was neitherāmight finally get the funding and standing it so needed, with close to 40,000 dying yearly by then.
12 December 2000: A Judicial Coup takes place in America a month after the November presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, when the US Supreme Court intervenes to stop the Florida vote recount. It gives Bush Floridaās 25 Electoral College votesādespite losing the national election by over 500,000 votes, and maybe Florida as well!? Weāll never know. I was in Munich, Germany, and I was absolutely disgusted. Judicial activism, indeed. American democracy was no more. And it happened again in 2016 when the biggest loser won. Ā
11 September 2001: 9/11. I was in bed in Santa Monica, err, lounging, and our phones were ringing off the hookāyep, landlines. The barbarians were at the gate, or had Zeus hurled a lightning bolt at America? Like most, I was stunned. But so realized that America would reflexively seek revenge and overreact, as we are prone to do, creating mayhem in the world. I got so drunk on Night Three, knowing this deep in my heart. Sadly, I was right, too: Americaās ensuing War on Terror has been responsible for two shameful 20-year wars, the loss of $8 trillion in taxpayer funds, and over 900,000 worldwide deaths. Mission accomplished.
15 September 2008: A Financial Coup takes place in America when US taxpayers bail out the ātoo big to failā banks, saving them from justified capitalist ruin. The housing boom went bust, and high-risk āsubprimeā mortgage-giving investment bank Lehman Brothers went belly up. I remember a long talk with my neighbor Chad Joe at our compound in British Colombia: How things would be different tomorrow, that cash was king, and we should all prepare to financially hunker down for a while, as a recession was coming. Right again, sadly. Because not only did the ensuing Great Recession set working-class Americans back financially a decade but it costĀ every AmericanĀ approximately $70,000ā¦not to mention an extra 200,000+ suicides in the US in 2008 & 2009. And no one went to jail! Why? Because as FED Chair Bernanke said, "Everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm." But he continued, saying a financial firm was a legal fiction, not a person, and that "you can't put a firm in jail." Why not? Friedman Reaganomics was wholly discredited that day because the private sector is often the problem, and the government is the solution! Americaās financial coup was complete: Congress agreed to privatize profits but socialize losses.
11 March 2020: The day COVID-19 changed all our lives. I knew COVID-19 was coming, I had been planning our 2020 trip around-the-world and the countries we could take people kept shrinking. But I really knew the shit had hit the fan while I was riding my exercise bike, and the NBA suspended the season until further notice after a Utah Jazz player tested positive. At the time, there were only about 1,280 infections in the US, with 38 deaths. So that night, I wrote a long email to my daughter, who was at grad school in The Netherlands, warning her that things would be different for a while and to get ready to hunker down. Just didn't know it would take over a year!?
Ā 6 January 2021: Ahh, yes, the January 6th insurrection/coup attempt. Watched it all āliveā and in living colorāall those Confederate and Trumpās-the-new-Jesus flags, same-same. A day that will live in infamy and, perhaps, the harbinger of whatās to come. Time will tell.
Thatās my list. Sorry, no Lady Di nor Michael Jackson is dead impact on me (31 August 1997 & 25 June 2009, respectively). No Leafsā win The Stanley Cup memoriesāthat would have been 2 May 1967! And no O.J. verdict (3 October 1995) or Miracle on Ice (22 February 1980) moments. Although John Lennonās death (8 December 1980), the Oklahoma City bombing (19 April 1995), and the Asian tsunami (26 December 2004) did seriously resonate with me, but they didnāt make the cut.
But know, we all do live in interesting times! What are yours?
*And circling back to my kids, they have been through a shitstorm, havenāt they? Think about it, try as we must to shield and prepare them, it has been one horrific historic eventāto themāafter another: Columbine massacre (1999); Y2K scare; dot-com bubble recession (2000); Enron scandal (2001); 9/11 uncertainty (we have to take off our shoes to get on a plane); War on Terror; Afghanistan War; Iraqi War; SARS (2003); Darfur genocide (2003); Indian Ocean tsunami (2004); US black site torture chambers (2004); Hurricane Katrina (2005); Virginia Tech massacre (2007); Climate change unaddressed; ADHD medications; Smartphones; Social media anxiety; 2008 Great Recession; Madoff Ponzi scheme (2008); N1H1 (2009); diseases of despair (2010); 2011 Fukushima earthquake; Political gridlockāthe grown-ups arenāt working together; Sandy Hook massacre (2012); Aurora theater shooting (2012); stagnant wages; 2013 government shutdown; #BLM (2013); Boston marathon bombing (2013); Yazidis genocide (2014); MERS (2014); San Bernardino mass shooting (2015); Paris terrorist attack (2015); Student debt; Pulse nightclub massacre (2016); precarious Gig jobs; Uyghur genocide (2016); Brexit (2016); Zika (2016); rise of Trump/MAGA (2016); Las Vegas strip massacre (2017); Texas Baptists massacre (2017); #MeToo (2017); Rohingya genocide (2017); Tree of Life shooting (2018); Parkland high school shooting (2018); significant severe weather events; 2018 government shutdown; Theranos scandal (2018); College admission scandal (2019); El Paso Walmart shooting (2019); Trump impeachment #1 (2019); Covid-19 lockdowns (2020-21); stock market crash (2020); Purdue Pharma opioid scandal (2021); Jan 6th insurrection (2021); Trump impeachment #2 (2021); global supply chains falter (2021); Ukrainian war (2022); FTX crypto-Ponzi scheme (2022)ā¦and the beat goes on. And we wonder why the kids see the glass as half empty and are so anxious. Shit, I know I am!
Thanks for the privilege of your time, it is the most precious thing we have, and I appreciate it. Be well.
Ā William D. Chalmers Ā© 2022 GreatEscape Adventures, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I have been reminded of one day I missed. Thank you D! - 28 September 1972 ā The infamous Canada-Soviet Union hockey Summit Series was knotted up: 3 wins, 3 losses, and a tie. It was ugly on so many levels: sportsmanship, hockey invincibility, Cold War politics, and raw emotions. Fellow students and teachers watched it live in the cafeteria of high school at F.J. Brennan, along with 80% of all Canadians. It was a BIG deal. In the third period, Canada is trailing 5-2. We were all depressed. But Phil Esposito, my hockey camp mentor, led the way back with four points getting the game tied up 5-5 with a minute to playā¦CBCās Foster Hewitt takes it home: āCournoyer has it on that wing. Here's a shot. Henderson made a wild stab for it and fell. Here's another shot. Right in front, they score! Henderson has scored for Canada!ā A thrilling 6-5 win. No trophy, no medals, no prize money, and no post-game ceremonyā¦but Canada was still the best at hockey!