The new normal
It will soon be 18 years since the 9/11 attacks.
The folks who were born in 2001, the first group of people who have never known any better in their entire lives than what has unfolded since then, that group will be of voting age this year.
There are likely metrics that can objectively show we live in safer times today than 20 years ago, but the world’s violence seems perceivable well beyond what my generation had to absorb in the 80s and 90s.
Just like the climate becoming warmer, there’s a baseline trend of a world that is getting safer and more peaceful, not just over the last century years but also since just 2 decades ago. And just like we tend to notice a hail day in June (a-hem), our timelines sporadically wake up to report on the latest violent act in the world: global terrorist attacks, unfathomable acts of gun violence, refugees drowning by the thousands, wars that have no end in sight.
Sometimes, one of these sticks around and forgets to go away. My last post in this space dates back from almost four years ago, right after the attack that hit the Bataclan. I’m not sure why I anchored onto this one event more than I did others. My thoughts about it kept looping back and feeding on themselves. They grew stronger when the testimonies of the survivors started making it out. They grew stronger when I pictured what happened in that space. They grew stronger when I wondered why it all happened.
Barely a year later came the 2016 election, which brought a different kind of mental blow. Seeing fascism rise so hard and so fast, both in the country I call home and abroad. The daily grind of dealing with the non-stop bullshit and verbal diarrhea falling from the highest level of leadership.
And I think about the kids who were born in 2001 –my nephew being one of them– and how these are the examples that are set for them, this is the life they know and how disappointing that must be. I’d almost like to lie to them that the world used to be better. But I keep myself honest in the most basic and dull kind of way: it was just different. It was violent and racist and sexist in different ways — in a more diffuse and tolerated fashion.
To me, the last 18 years feel like a weird string of events that portray a world going from bad to worse to even worse. And at the tail end of that, the change caught up to me and I stopped updating my website for a while and not a lot of value was lost. I don’t think this cycle of bad thoughts has quite ended yet, but it has become tamer over time. And a lot of things have happened since 4 years ago. Time to catch up on that.