Major World Events

One summer in middle school I volunteered as a Vacation Bible School camp councilor, but all that I remember from it is the fascinating way those kids talked about the past. They assumed that all events before they were born happened roughly simultaneously, that Jesus died on the cross at around the same time as their parents went to college, and God created the heavens and the earth back when George Washington fought off the British. In their minds, the world used to be a frightening and exciting place, where angels visited prophets and nations went to war about once every fifteen minutes. Then they were born, world events settled down and the history stopped. When I talked to them about it, they seemed relieved that they had been born into a simpler, safer world than their parents, but a little disappointed too. Scary as the past was, it would’ve been nice to hang out in that world at least long enough to see a dinosaur (which, according to them, died out sometime in the 1980’s).

This way of thinking intrigued me in part because it was so familiar. I followed a less extreme version of it even then, and would for years to come. Sure, on a conceptual level I knew that things happened as slowly in the past as they did in the present, but I definitely got the sense that the world had decided to halt major events when I came around. The obvious exception to that was 9/11, but by time I was old enough to understand it, I’d forgotten what it was like in the moment. Then there was the Obama election, but I grew up in such a conservative town with such liberal parents that I couldn’t decide how I was supposed to feel about it and ended up registering it as a mostly neutral event. The U.S. was at war through most of my childhood, but the information was so muddled and the event so distant that I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.

Because of this, for most of my life I had the distinct feeling that I was missing out on history. You could attribute this to my general disinterest in present reality, always imagining that there’s something better in the past or future or some fantasy world that never existed. (I’m still a little like that: I have trouble getting into modern space exploration, but I marvel at archiac scientists with crude telescopes who thought that there were jungles under Venus’s thick atmosphere or that Mars’s stones were red with blood from alien wars). But there is some truth to this too, I think: aside from a blip in the housing crisis, we had a fairly stable nation from 2001 to 2016. And, though it was never really on the front of my mind, I did have an idle wish that I could live in an era someone could study or write historical fiction about.

Ever since November of 2016, that wish has seemed like some kind of monkey’s paw-style curse. I forgot that, with precious few exceptions, people don’t remember major world events because everyone had a good time. Usually, it’s an event because a whole lot of people die. 

It’s impossible to deny that we’re in some sort of major world event right now. Even home in sheltered, suburban Edina, there are no cars on the highway and basic amenities are disappearing from the grocery store. My parents and brother and sister and her girlfriend and my girlfriend are all under one roof, none of us entirely sure what the next step in each of our lives will be. In a way, it feels like a gritty reboot of what I thought the past was like as a six-year-old: disaster and excitement in a chaotic mess, nothing stable for more than a couple minutes.

But in the midst of it all, there is a sense of peace that I don’t think any six-year-old could have predicted. For the first time ever, Mica is meeting my entire family and staying at my house for more than a few days. Even pandemonium isn’t what I predicted, I guess. And there’s that to be thankful for.