Nows and Forevers

I was born during the Vietnam War, came of age in the Cold War and 9/11 was a pivotal moment of my adulthood. The 21st century hasn’t been that great a time and it doesn’t look any better anytime soon.

At least I got to see the end of the Cold War. It didn’t end as tragically as all of us feared it might. When Jesus Jones sings about how knowing the world could change in a blink of an eye, that’s exactly what we knew.

Who thought it would change for the good in 1991?

And while the collapse of the Soviet Union laid the seeds for where we are today, there was a time in in the 1990s when it looked like we might have peace in our time.

The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union ended, as did the Soviet Bloc. We got peace in Northern Ireland, came awful close in the Middle East. And we had a long stretch of prosperity here in the United States. It wasn’t all perfect (Rwanda, Tianamen Square in ’89, Bosnia, the drugs and violence here in the USA to name a few). But it was as close as we have come in my lifetime.

We really did, as this Jesus Jones song from 1991, “Right Here Right Now” put it, watch the world wake up from history. It’s just too bad we couldn’t all take hold of it.

“I was alive and I waited for this.”

I remember nightmares of nuclear holocaust and how close we came. If you weren’t scared growing up, then you weren’t looking closely enough. But what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – two very unlikely peacemakers – ushered in, other men and women followed.

Where are their descendants now? I don’t see them.

It was, to live in that time, extraordinary. Maybe we didn’t fully appreciate it. Or realize it could be rolled away, within and without.

We should have.