I was considering making a post tonight, and I just happened to look down at the clock on my computer and saw that it was 9:11.
Yeah, I guess that was a hint. Another hint, since I’d just been on a website researching our next year’s vacation to Disney World and got blindsided by an old featured post that almost made me cry.
Not to mention the other old post I saw a few hours ago about how much things have changed since that day in 2001. It mentioned how a lot of the younger adult generation are too young to remember things being any other way, how they’ve never known a world without mass government surveillance or increasingly invasive security procedures in airports or regular references to terrorism. And it struck a chord with me, because my kids are in their early twenties and they don’t remember a world without those things.
But of course, they also don’t remember a world without cell phones or computers or cable, the same way I don’t remember a world without indoor plumbing and telephones – my mother does. My children’s children won’t remember Google as just a search engine or Amazon as just a bookstore, and they possibly won’t know what a taxi is. And that will be their world, and I think all we can hope for is that they won’t suddenly have to red-letter a new date on their world’s calendar to mark the day when everything changed to be just a little bit worse than the world their parents remember.
Or maybe if we hope really hard and get really lucky, their red-letter date will mark the day their world changed for the better. That would really be something, wouldn’t it?