For a long time at the turn of the century/millennium, I had a difficult time, mentally, to adjust to the new years. It seemed so radically different to me, describing years with "twenty" instead of nineteen. it was strange. Somehow, it felt surreal to me, even though nobody around me seemed to have the same problems adjusting.
Also, it felt like the years were just blending into one another. At least that was the case after a few years. Maybe 2000 and 2001 were different, and particularly September 11th. That felt like a definitive break from the past. If there was one event where everyone knew the 20th century really was over, it would have been September 11th.
But after those two years, it indeed felt like the years just kind of blended together. The 2000's and 2010's really did not feel as distinctive, in terms of what those decades were, as past decades had been. I mean that past decades - those of the 20th century - all seemed to have a distinctive identity. You didn't even have to be around to know and understand them, at least on some level. When I think about, say, the 1950's, conformity comes to mind. Leave it to Beaver and Howdy Doody, and that kind of thing. Images on television in black and white. Dwight Eisenhower in the White House. The Red Scare. People wearing conservative clothes, and men always wearing hats.
The Sixties were quite different. It began similarly enough, with black and white television images, although it was the Kennedys and Camelot in the White House. Then, there was the Kennedy assassination, and everything began to speed up and grow more colorful. It started with the Beatles, and then rock music seemed to explode. Music grew more experimental, and the world grew more colorful, and it was reflected with increasingly, color images on television and movies. Drugs began to gain prominence. The Vietnam conflict in Asia dominated evening news and headlines in newspapers. The civil rights movement and women's liberation. Protests on the streets. Woodstock. And fashion was unique to those times. Hippies wearing more colorful clothes and longer hair, as well as facial hair. The peace sign and a certain lingo of the times.
When you think of the Seventies, you might think of disco. Bell bottoms. Hard rock music. Men showing off their chest hair. Turbulent times, politically, but if you are American, you think of maybe Richard Nixon in the first part of the decade, and Jimmy Carter in the latter part of the decade. Maybe the lines for gas. Think of the Eighties, and you think of more preppy clothing. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the "Me" decade of excess materialism. The fall of the Berlin Wall right at the end of the decade. Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince dominating pop music. Synthesizers dominating the sound of popular music. Then we get to the Nineties. The Lollapalooza Festival. Grunge music, which seemed to originate from Seattle, which also gave us a new coffee culture and Microsoft. Bill Clinton in the White House. In terms of fashion, perhaps backwards baseball hats, flannel shirts and cargo shorts.
Whatever their strengths or weaknesses, those were the times that we all lived in, assuming that we were around. Generally speaking, the things I mentioned - and surely, plenty of things which I forgot to mention - really defined those times. And it seemed to me for quite some time that the 21st century seemed to lack those distinctions. And that gave the illusion that all of these years just kind of blended together. That there might be significant differences in the times, yet they nevertheless were more difficult to differentiate than decades used to be.
Then I ran into this video by Adam Conover. And right away, I finally felt that somebody was voicing what I had felt (and sometimes thought I was a bit crazy for) about the 21st century. He talks about how the years no longer seem to be classified into definitive decades. And there are several reasons for that, which Conover covers here.
Take a look at this video, and see if he does not make some valid points. My suspicion is that he has a point about us fixating on generational tendencies and fashions and such, and that this reinforces divisiveness (as if we need any more of that). Also, we seem to define times in terms of being followed by disasters, such as post-9/11 and post-pandemic.
So maybe it is time to bring back our more traditional decades. Maybe fashions will follow, or maybe they will not. But it's time to try and bring us together with shared experiences again. That much I can certainly agree with.
What Happened to Decades?
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