I read once that we participate socially more times in one month than people 150 years ago did all year. I guess we didn’t get out much then. Now we do. Now we move our life forward at a faster pace. But there are still moments that slow us down – game changer moments, if you will. I think we should pause and honor those moments because they are an integral part of the human story and our own story.
My dad was born two years after the Wright Brothers conquered the winds at Kitty Hawk and flew their plane. So impacted by this event, my dad became one of the first few generations of pilots in the Air Force. He died the year Neil Armstrong put his footprint on the moon. Two game-changing events that defined his 65 years.
My mother died just shy of her 93rd year. She shared stories of how her grandfather fought in the Civil War. That war seems close to me in time – after all, for me, it’s only three generations back, and I’m not that old. When people talk of The War, sometimes that is my first history reference. My dad fought in WW II as a pilot in the then Army-Air Corp, so WW II doesn’t seem like a long ago war, either. It startles me to hear people studying both wars as if they are long, long ago “history”.
20th Century Game Changers
Other game changers in the 20th century that are still resonating in our psyche – the suffrage campaign, MLK’s march on Selma, Alabama, Johnson’s War on Poverty, Roe v. Wade, the Viet Nam War, the Iraq War – both first and second editions, 9/11. The collapse of world markets in both 1920 and 2008. The explosion of the digital age. We forget, but the I-pad was released on April 3, 2010 and the I-phone on June 29, 2007. Both products are so integral to our lives, yet they have only been part of our social consciousness for just under a decade.
As for me, 2013 had special meaning as it marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I was ten at the time. Home sick with the flu, I was allowed to watch an hour of television. This was a privilege in those days because not everyone was a fan of the visual medium for telling stories. Up until then, Story was either acted around a campfire, performed on a stage, read in a book, or heard on a radio. Movies were a different entity. They were an “event”. The television was an intimate experience combined which happened in our home while visually connecting us to the outside world. This blurring of the lines was unsettling for a lot of people.
Soap Operas as Story
I chose a soap opera for my hour of Story, because it was several stories intertwined. I turned the knob on our black and white console and settled in. Instead of the familiar soap opera came the iconic circle within a circle – the “eye” logo of CBS. Then, Walter Cronkite, pale, shaken, and disbelieving as he announced that Kennedy had been shot. I raced to tell my parents, who in turn started making phone calls. The news spread in an ever widening circle as all of us tried to adjust to this game changer.
The soap opera I was about to watch was As the World Turns.
My dad was born two years after the Wright Brothers conquered the winds at Kitty Hawk and flew their plane. So impacted by this event, my dad became one of the first few generations of pilots in the Air Force. He died the year Neil Armstrong put his footprint on the moon. Two game-changing events that defined his 65 years.
My mother died just shy of her 93rd year. She shared stories of how her grandfather fought in the Civil War. That war seems close to me in time – after all, for me, it’s only three generations back, and I’m not that old. When people talk of The War, sometimes that is my first history reference. My dad fought in WW II as a pilot in the then Army-Air Corp, so WW II doesn’t seem like a long ago war, either. It startles me to hear people studying both wars as if they are long, long ago “history”.
20th Century Game Changers
Other game changers in the 20th century that are still resonating in our psyche – the suffrage campaign, MLK’s march on Selma, Alabama, Johnson’s War on Poverty, Roe v. Wade, the Viet Nam War, the Iraq War – both first and second editions, 9/11. The collapse of world markets in both 1920 and 2008. The explosion of the digital age. We forget, but the I-pad was released on April 3, 2010 and the I-phone on June 29, 2007. Both products are so integral to our lives, yet they have only been part of our social consciousness for just under a decade.
As for me, 2013 had special meaning as it marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I was ten at the time. Home sick with the flu, I was allowed to watch an hour of television. This was a privilege in those days because not everyone was a fan of the visual medium for telling stories. Up until then, Story was either acted around a campfire, performed on a stage, read in a book, or heard on a radio. Movies were a different entity. They were an “event”. The television was an intimate experience combined which happened in our home while visually connecting us to the outside world. This blurring of the lines was unsettling for a lot of people.
Soap Operas as Story
I chose a soap opera for my hour of Story, because it was several stories intertwined. I turned the knob on our black and white console and settled in. Instead of the familiar soap opera came the iconic circle within a circle – the “eye” logo of CBS. Then, Walter Cronkite, pale, shaken, and disbelieving as he announced that Kennedy had been shot. I raced to tell my parents, who in turn started making phone calls. The news spread in an ever widening circle as all of us tried to adjust to this game changer.
The soap opera I was about to watch was As the World Turns.
