What follows represents some pretty hardcore navel gazing.
On June 14th I completed my 40th trip around the sun. This may be the engineer in me but I have this weird sense of discomfort as I head off on trip number 41 and it doesn’t have anything to do with a pandemic or anything else going on in the world. I was born in 1980 and am now 40. So this birthday marks a perfect symmetry to the timeline of my life. The year 2000 was the mid-point to me having lived equally in two centuries. Even in my, thus far, short life there has been such a massive change in how we live. I was born before cable TV, computers, the internet, and cellphones. I am one of those people who went out to play (alone with just a group of other kids) until the street lights came on. My brothers and I had to beg for an NES for three years before FINALLY getting one for Christmas. I am also one of those people who trolled the chatrooms of America Online. I burned through countless “trial” memberships of the service.
As I reflect on my life, the year 2000 doesn’t just represent a new century (we all know 2001 represented the actual new century) but I look at it as a demarcation line - the year where human communication underwent a paradigm shift. I know it would be a few more years until cellphones really took off, but 2000 changed a lot. I know 9/11 was in 2001, but that’s pretty close to 2000. I spent January 1, 2000 with 100,000 friends, and strangers, in the middle of the Everglades at a concert. I spent my 40th birthday in a world defined by fear and isolation. Soldiers are still fighting terror, I guess. Police are still fighting drugs, or are they? People have been isolating themselves for months because of a virus. The second 20 years has been wholly different from the first 20 years. But maybe that’s just because I’ve grown up. I’m not a child living in the bubble of security that I relied on my parents to provide for me.
It would be ignorant for me to not mention that during June of 2020 hundreds of thousands of American’s, and people around the world, went out to protest the killing of a black man at the hands of a police officer. An act captured on camera and shared for the world to see on the internet. An action that can barely be described adequately as senseless, disgusting, excessive and a miscarriage of the duty of the police to “protect and serve.” Some people have indicated that George Floyd was suffering an overdose. I don’t know if he did or didn’t, but would that make what we saw in the video ok?
I didn’t do much for my birthday this year. But I did spend some time thinking about where I - and we as humans – have been and where we are going.