When 2000 came around, aside from all the fuss over Y2K, it felt like any other year.
Of course there were those who held that the new millennium wouldn’t really start until January 1, 2001. And 2001 did bring change, cataclysmic change. In this country, 9/11 truly altered everything about the way we perceived the world—and how the world perceived us, the effects of which are with us today, every time we go through a metal detector, have a security guard train a flashlight in our bags, every time we look over our shoulders in a crowd.
But we learned to adapt—living, loving, laughing, crying—just as we had done in the 20th Century.
Over the next decade, technology kept changing at a rapid pace; we adjusted.
Politics got uglier; we bristled and moved along.
Styles changed; celebrities, books, movies came (accompanied by “Ohs” and “Ahs”) and went.
I entered every new year of the new century as though I were sticking a toe in the tub to check the temperature. And the water was always fine.
Now, though, I look back on the 20th Century as if it were a million years ago. When I was a kid, people walked the earth who were around during the Civil War. That was startling to me, but it’s not so different as my telling my grandchildren today that I was born not long after World War II.
All those old photos of my sister and me in our pink sheaths and pillbox hats must look to our grandchildren like our grandmothers looked to us in their black dresses and orthopedic lace ups: not only from a time long ago but from a different world.
It isn’t just these superficial differences. It goes much deeper. Our parents and grandparents had seen the worst there was to see, and their reality shaped them—and us. In the 1950s Allied films of the Nazi concentration camps found their way to American television: primetime. I was a child, sitting on my mother’s lap, when one program aired footage of the camps. (For some unverifiable and wholly incongruous reason, I seem to remember it having been “The Ed Sullivan Show.”) The airing network didn’t concern itself with trigger warnings. No one sought a safe place. We saw, with mouths open, the horrors of those camps, bodies heaped upon bodies in open ditches, walking skeletons in striped tatters, shadows of who they once were.
That footage would remain with me, forever the touchstone of man’s inhumanity to man.
And our teachers in those days kept up the steady drumbeat, with dire and direct warnings against totalitarianism, in all its forms.
By my last year in college I had been steeped in books like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Trial, and Darkness at Noon. I’m not sure I got all the nuances, the surface and the subtext, but there was a message I did learn: tyrants, demagogues, and the authoritarian governments that protect them are more than constructs of an overheated imagination. They have wreaked havoc on the world for centuries—and in the very recent past. The obvious warning: they can rise up in the most unexpected corners of the world—more than likely exactly there, where people live in impenetrable complacency.
Now, entering 2017, I finally believe the 21st Century has arrived.
I first knew it when I saw the President-elect “talk to the country” via YouTube. (No press conference for him. So 20th Century.) When I saw that talking head, I had the eerie feeling I had seen the image before. Yes, it was the scene from 1984. I saw then the potential for a New York real estate guy, a reality TV guy, a candidate for “Dancing with the Stars” (if he could just lose a few pounds), the potential for that guy to be Big Brother.
And the technology was there to complete the transformation. In this new reality, we were all to be under surveillance all the time, given away by our computers, our smart houses, smart cars, smart phones. (Cover your computer cameras! It’s true. They could be watching.)
Never before had Big Brother come so close to being incarnated in the guise of a flaccid chin and a bad comb over.
It’s been reported that our new POTUS may decide to take over “Voice of America” (Politico, 12/12/16). You remember, that “authoritative source of news,” required to be “accurate objective, and comprehensive”—all the adjectives normally associated with the current President-elect. (Right!) And he may begin sending us messages over the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. These are unblockable, mass text messages sent to the entire nation. (New York Magazine, November 30, 2016). It would be like getting his Tweets, only you could not NOT get them.
Speaking of Tweets, he continues to send them and to attack dissenters. How long before the dissent grows and is deemed serious, a threat to the state? How long before there is retaliation?
We cannot pretend this scenario is not possible. The technology is in place to make for a brave new world, indeed.
And who knows when Big Brother may be coming for you?
Happy New Year.