So Little Time, So Much Change
By John Addyman
Think about it: 25 years have passed since the last time you wrote 1999 on a check.
Wait…who uses checks anymore?
In fact, how often do you pay for anything with coins and bills?
Today your grandchildren have their own phones. Your grandkids. And they don’t call anybody on those phones — kids only text and look at social media on their phones. If you want to tell them you love them and hear the sound of their voices, listen to the voicemail announcement on their phones, then leave them a text.
The internet and computers run more and more of our lives.
Nobody smokes in a restaurant.
Access to abortion was a right in 1999. How that landscape has changed.
When you fly, you now have to take off your shoes.
A bright young woman named Taylor Swift made more money this year than many huge corporations did in 1999.
In church this weekend, you may well be sitting in the pew alone.
And according to professor Timothy Kneeland at Nazareth University, these are just some of the signs that a lot has happened in the last 25 years.
Kneeland has been teaching for 26 years, arriving at Nazareth in 2000. He is the director of the Center for Public History and the Public History Program in History, Politics and Law.
He put the question to his bright young students in September: “What have been the big changes in the last 25 years?”
“My students thought, clearly, that the number one thing was technology,” he said. “The development of the smart phone and social media — those were the biggest ways, they felt, that the first 25 years of the century are changed and different.”
“Another interesting thing,” he added, “they focused in on LBGTQ+ rights, how they have rapidly been secured and recognized in things such as Obergefell v. Hodges, the court case in 2013 when the Supreme Court recognized the right of gay marriage. They thought that was pretty significant.”
He said they talked a little about climate change, an issue they see as “pretty significant.”
“They also thought race had become significant in America, both in Obama’s election but also Black Lives Matter. He said his students recognize the existence of structural racism — “they don’t bat an eye, they see this as something that exists and therefore needs to be dealt with and they need to dismantle that structure.”
Interestingly, students didn’t mention 9/11.
“They weren’t even born when 9/11 happened,” Kneeland said. “But 9/11 explains so much of what happened in the first 25 years in terms of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of the problems we had globally in terms of our presence in various countries and how we have probably lost allies and increased distrust in areas of the world where we used to have more solid relationships. I’m thinking in particular of Turkey, where our relationships have been declining steadily for the last 10-15 years.”
Healthcare
Kneeland said the development of healthcare “as a right” in this century was very important.
“We bandied that about in the 20th century. We debated it, but no one now, seriously, on the right or the left, will say anything but healthcare is a right. That raising of your consciousness and the development of Obamacare, even as Republicans talk about dismantling it, you know they’re not going to take out the most popular parts of it.
“In other healthcare areas, think about trying to control the price of insulin as well as Medicare Part D, the so-called ‘doughnut hole.’ These are imperfect policies, but notice how they’re addressing a new sense of what the government has to take on as a responsible government. That’s huge.
“People in the 20th century were like, ‘Yeah, you’re healthy or you’re not.’ It seemed to be an individualized lifestyle, but now, government has a role to play and that explains, to a large extent, the whole government shutdown and the response to COVID-19. Although it varied state to state, people took it seriously, even though some red states didn’t keep the shutdowns very long. Then the development of a rapid new kind of mRNA vaccine to deal with it. And now, the government just announced in September that it’s giving us free COVID-19 tests again. Think about that.”
Kneeland, who has written four books and teaches about the presidency, natural disasters, epidemics and pandemics and public history, sees a rise — or you could consider it a deepening — of “American individualism.”
He referred to Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” in the 1990s, which saw that community organizations were no longer being revitalized.
How many people were in your church in 1999? How many were there last week?
“The idea of anomie or a sense of isolation has grown with the development of social media,” he said. “We are creating artificial relationships online, and trying to get meaning through ‘likes’ from other sources.
“It’s probably tied to the rise of anxiety in the younger generation, which is the most anxious generation, we’ve been told. We’ve certainly seen the decline for institutions.”
Hyper-individualized
He said the number of people who are not even interested in a spiritual pursuit are termed as “NONES” in politics. And the number is increasing. “If you look at presidential speeches, going back the last couple hundred years, people had no problem evoking God in a sort of generic way — the blessing,” he said. “As the importance of institutions declined, people became ‘hyper-individualized.’
“My students touched on this. We’ve had a breakdown in society — the mass shootings in our schools, which began at Columbine in 1999. This generation was raised doing preparedness for lock-downs or someone getting in the building. I suppose there could be some parallels with the generation that did drills because they thought atomic bombs were going to land on them. It certainly says something about the kind of society where we’re worried about prevalence of gun violence, not just on our streets, but in our schools.”
He also mentioned the 2008 financial crisis.
“That event helped explain the rise of both Obama and Trump. Both were experts in using social media to engage people but had very different visions of how to respond and meet the needs of society where economic growth continues to be unequally distributed,” he said. “Even if you’re sort of making it now, that low-grade anxiety in working-class America has led certainly to the rise of Trump.”
He cited a continuing decline in people’s political and social trust in institutions “because we never found weapons of mass destruction after going into Iraq, which only further eroded confidence in our government leaders.”
Students had first-hand experience with the pandemic. “Coming 100 years after the last pandemic, the shutdowns, the dislocations in education, the differentiation between people who could stay at home and work online, the white-collar workers versus those workers who had to be in person, the retailers, the essential workers like healthcare providers.”
People lost their lives in service of others in that differentiation.
“And it fits in with this rise of resistance to structural racism — Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, the death of Daniel Prude in police custody here in Rochester, Breonna Taylor and throughout the US. The pandemic was an accelerant, a catalyst for changes that were already happening. Those events were only a couple of years ago and we act like they don’t exist anymore, but the aftereffects are going to be with us for a while to come,” he said.
And there was more.
Sports
Kneeland talked about the “rise of the asterisk in baseball.” Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs go into the record book with an asterisk because of a longer season than Babe Ruth enjoyed…other asterisks shade recognition for players who set records but used performance-enhancing products in doing so, and will probably never see the Hall of Fame.
Women’s sports has burst out in soccer, the Olympics and basketball.
And there were scandals in women’s gymnastics.
Kneeland mentioned another head-shaker: “I’m fourth-generation Irish-American and three generations before me were all cops. My family spent an awful long time putting people away for vices that are today not only not criminalized but recognized and encouraged. Sports betting…talk about societal change.”
And there’s marijuana for sale in towns and villages.
Driving a car: “The younger generation doesn’t necessarily go out as soon as it can to get licenses. It’s very common for me to have a 20-year-old student who doesn’t have a license or has a license but doesn’t like to drive,” Kneeland pointed out.
Curating Your Own Reality
Finally, he talked about the social divide so evident in today’s America.
“It seems to be growing and growing. We know social media drives some of that and people are curating their own reality using social media,” he said. “We used to have limited places to get information. Back in the 20th century you had the major TV networks. Today, younger people are turning to places like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or other places, the so-called ‘influencers.’
“They’re not watching television anymore, but watching snippets of television on their laptops. They curate. They decide what they’re going to watch, not necessarily broadcasting, but narrowcasting. So, people can go and decide, ‘I really like this one person that I listen to on a podcast,’ and they listen to that person and an algorithm suggests other people similar to that.
“Instead of getting a broad array of information and be challenged in any way, people can reduce the information and curate it so they only hear things they already agree with. That was harder in the 20th century. Now that the younger generation won’t even listen to radio, but they will listen to podcasts.”
Yes, things have changed.