Livre d'Or

So I'm 2 years younger than you and I definitely have the same optimism--but I don't think my sibs do, and they are two and four years younger than me. It was a reeeeally tiny window.

I turned eight in '89 and I learned about the wall for the first time as it was falling, as we didn't talk much about other countries in school before that year. My childhood idol/hero was Samantha Smith--though my parents shielded me from the details of her early death and focused on her travels to the USSR. When I was about twelve, my younger sister actually got to travel to post-Soviet Russia for a couple of weeks, and we later hosted the young Russian girl she'd stayed with, in an international exchange. So I never had an understanding of the Cold War as anything other than an archaic thing on its way out. Now in fact, I was born into an era of heightened paranoia and nuclear standoff in the early Eighties. But when I was conscious, and able to retain memory, everything looked like it was on the way up.

In the US the 90s were a time of economic prosperity and stability that has since gone extinct--people are now too entrenched in a fear-based politics for that to ever happen again. And yeah, global capitalism is kind of wretched if you're living outside what I learned to call the "First World" back then, but as a teenager in what was then considered the lone remaining superpower, I had it pretty good. When I went to look at colleges and make a decision about where to do undergrad (as most people do in the US I chose the school long before I decided on my course of study there), all I heard about was how people were graduating into a world of competing job offers. And in my case, the myth of meritocracy was prominently at work--this idea that I could so totally go from subsidized housing for the poor to an Ivy League school, that I could do anything or be anything I wanted. There was a tangible sense that the world was mine for the taking.

Then I went to college and by the time I graduated there had been a terrorist attack and we were going to war in an extended fashion for the first time in my life. (Gulf War I was a blip on my radar in Grade Four, but no one had the sense that that war was going to change American culture--it was promoted to children, certainly, as a humanitarian intervention.) The truth is, of course, that American military power and economic forces were at work in the world throughout my life, often in ways that had negative consequences for people in other countries, but I was the embodiment of what those efforts were designed to protect. Then I woke up one day in September as a college student in NYC, and I went to a French exam and heard all these sirens zooming down Broadway for hours and hours and hours... I've never again been as scared as I was then.

You know, it's funny, but I do think that in the end, I get more optimism than cynicism from my experiences in 2001. I thought of myself as a peaceful person before then, but I reacted strongly against the military actions of the next decade from the very beginning, and became much more emphatically anti-war. I don't know how anyone could experience the NYC of September 12 and not be optimistic about the future. And yet I know that tons of people became more security-focused, scared, went and enlisted--people had all sorts of reactions, as they are wont to do. Still, I just kind of can't help but feel like there's hope, and that's a big part of how I view both the world and my own individual life. And I feel like the inevitability of my belief is largely because of that tiny window, when you could, if you were in the right situation, truly be born into a world that was designed to enable you.

(NB: I'm white, cis, have had uncommon access to education my whole life, and experienced more class mobility than many. I don't discount any of those advantages here.)