There’s that moment that defines a generation, so they say. That moment that you’ll always remember where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when you heard.
We’ve now had four. Four defining moments in just a decade. Not even a generation, just a decade.
- On September 11th, 2001, I was walking to my 3rd period chemistry class as news broke out in my western Virginia high school that terrorists had hijacked four planes. We watched as the towers were on fire, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and the towers eventually crumbled. I remember the exact outfit I wore to school that day; how they locked our school down; and how I sat down in class crossed my arms on the table, put my head down, and closed my eyes trying not to cry.
Before September 11th, I used to visit my grandmother in DC all the time. When she’d drive me home, instead of driving down Constitution Ave from her Capitol Hill apartment, she’d take me down E Street. At that time, you could actually drive in front of the White House. To anyone who moved to DC after 2001, you probably didn’t know you could do that. Those guards sitting in their stations all day, every day, weren’t always there.
- Three months before I graduated high school, I was on a field trip to New York City with my year book class when a girl on the trip got a call saying that George Bush declared war on Iraq. The group was sitting in the Stardust Diner in Times Square not sure what to do or what it meant. The next day, instead of going to workshops about font types and page themes, our chaperones let us walk the streets of the city and catch demonstrations from anti-war protestors. The images of hundreds of women covered head-to-toe in black outfits walking through the busiest streets of Manhattan are still etched in my head, even if my Photobucket account has expired and those images are gone.
When I got home from this trip, an acceptance letter to The George Washington University was sitting on my desk at home. I instantly knew I was going to go to GW, but, because campus is so close to the White House, my family and I actually sat down and planned an escape route in case something were to happen.
- Fast forward 5 years and 5 months later, and I’m back in New York — this time Queens — watching MSNBC turn Virginia blue for the first time in 48 years and announcing Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States. A coworker was stuck on the Subway and finally made it up to my friend’s apartment seconds before Obama made his acceptance speech. We were yelling as she ran up the three flights of stairs to get to the apartment telling her to hurry. She plopped herself down on the couch and we all sat in silence as we watched this amazing thing happen. A few hours later, I found myself and a few others walking to a bar in Brooklyn, high-fiving and hugging strangers on the street at 3AM. We all ordered beers, but none of us cared about finishing them — we were still glued to the television coverage being shown in the bar.
I’d just moved to New York in September before the election and hadn’t yet switched my voter registration because I wanted my vote to be counted in Virginia. I didn’t have time to request an absentee ballot so, on Halloween night 2008, I got on a train from New York to Richmond to vote early. I gave up my one and only New York Halloween weekend to make sure my vote was counted, to make sure Virginia turned blue… and we did it.
- Then, there’s tonight. Tonight, I’m alone in my apartment watching Twitter break the news. Yes, Twitter. For 3.5 hours, I’ve been watching my Twitter feed to see what was about to happen as soon as the President announced that he was going to make an announcement. I had two live-streams queued up, the front pages of every major US newspaper in a browser tab, and was flicking channels back and forth waiting for the announcement. The speech will go down as maybe his best yet (and I’m guessing will be used in a variety of reelection ads), but I’m probably going to remember watching my feed turn from boring Sunday night chatter and people dropping off to go to bed to literally seeing it being throttled by the tweets about the announcement. No one on my feed was tweeting about anything else.
Tomorrow, we wake up in a new world again. Again. Our generation won’t be defined by one moment or one thing, but by the many that shape our attitudes and society and how we move forward after them.
I hope we get it right.
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