Rebuilding Rob

As of this writing, I’m 49. I feel like for much of my life – and that of my entire generation for that matter – we didn’t have a lot of world events thrown at us, until we were adults. But here’s some of the bigger ones, and how I remember them

The death of John Lennon – I’m reluctant to include the death of a rock star on here, but John Lennon transcended the music industry. The clip we normally see on the new now is Howard Cossell breaking the news during Monday Night Football. I was 6 at the time so my recollections are spotty at best. In fact, I want to say that I have a clearer memory of hearing that Lennon was shot; as opposed to hearing that he had died. This is my earliest memory of a major world event.

The space shuttle Challenger explosion – its funny the way that one historical event, or multiple events, have a way of putting one another into perspective. There was a time when people through the Challenger explosion was destined to be the defining historical moment of my generation. I was in 6th grade and I had gone home for lunch that day. I didn’t watch the explosion live on TV, as many people had. I had gone home to watch a Hulk Hogan match from the previous nights episode of Prime Time Wrestling that I had recorded on a new-to-us electronic device called a Video Cassette Recorder. While this was a horrific tragedy, one that derailed NASA’s manned specs flight for several years, it’s place as a major world – or even national event – would be overshadowed by things to come.

9/11 – I was just waking up for the day after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I had turned on my local morning news earlier as I drifted in and out of sleep. As I was coming to, I thought I was looking at the typical “B roll” footage of the local skyline when they showed a long short of the WTC with smoke coming out of one of the towers.

That building’s too big to be in Detroit I thought to myself as I saw the Manhattan skyline through blurry eyes. I went to my living room, put on CNN, and watched the rest that moment unfold on live TV.

X1, my wife at the time, was finishing her last college course that semester. Her commute would take her past our local airport on I-94. After the President had grounded every plane in US airspace, I told her There’s no way you’re driving anywhere near Metro today. When she called the school to let them she wouldn’t be in, they said “thats okay. If this goes any further, the next thing they’ll do is close the freeways”. For those who are too young to remember 9/11, there were times in the immediate where we weren’t sure if World War III was about to start.

If the Challenger explosion was the “Kennedy assassination moment of our generation”, then 9-11 was our Pearl Harbor.

The election of President Barack Obama – this wasn’t a singular moment as much as it was an entire movement. I don’t have a “I remember where I was when…” moment as much as I remember the overall mood of the country at the time. Obama’s ascent to the White House, like his political career to that point, was like a force of nature; reinvigorating many, while troubling others. But everybody was affected by it.

Whether you like the guy (I do) or not, one cannot understate the historical significance of Obama’s election. As a teacher, I think I’d a lot of things I. School terms. You know those Black History Month posters you see around February; the one that have pictures of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King? Obama is going to be one of those permanent icons of African American history; standing side by side with Tubman and MLK, forever.

What major historical events do you remember?

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