By Alexei Summers (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 8, 2012
The other day, a friend and I had a conversation about an article I’d written about the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
“Alexei,” he said, “really, why are you so certain the world is going to blow itself up? Must you be so damned pessimistic all the time in your writing? Your whole generation is like that. You’re all pessimists.”
He looked at me sternly.
“Do you really believe this guff about there being a third World War waiting to happen?”
This fellow was older than myself, and I won’t name him. Let’s just say that he’s of the mind that the Cold War is over, and we shouldn’t worry ourselves with wars breaking out. He told me that he’d survived the Cold War, and that my generation acting like the Cold War was still on was silly.
It soon dawned on me that this was not simply a clash of ideologies, but also a clash between two generations.
“My generation is fearful,” I told him. “We’re always afraid of being blown up. Just like yours was. But yours isn’t afraid anymore. We’re afraid we’re going to be the next victims in a terrorist attack, and we grew up with Cold War paranoia instilled into us. My generation grew up in the wake of the Cold War. So you’ll have to forgive us if we’re a bit cynical or mistrustful.” These thoughts lingered in my mind after the conversation ended, and I found myself deep in thought.
Those who lived through the 1990s remember them as a transitional decade. Analog technology was becoming antiquated and was being replaced with digital tech. There was the transfer of power in the USSR, and the eventual dissolving of the Soviet Union. There was the mass availability of the Internet, and the personal computer. These were the days of Clinton, Chrétien, Gorbachev, and (unfortunately) Yeltsin.
The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st created a wave of uncertainty within the minds of its youth: uncertainty of the future, and fear of the unknown.
I was one of those youths. On September 11, 2001, I turned on my television and watched in disbelief as an airplane flew directly into the twin towers in New York City, reducing them to dust and flame. Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the deadly attack that resulted in the death of thousands of human beings, of many different nationalities. To the ‘90s generation, this was a pivotal moment of childhood. All those who saw it can vividly recall what they were doing on that fateful morning. It is burned into our memories. This is the same equivalent of previous generations claims of being able to remember what they were doing when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas in 1963. The point I’m trying to make here is that there is still fear. The Cold War has never really ended. It carries on now through the proxy nations (like Afghanistan, Korea, Laos, and others) that the USSR once used to do their bidding. The USSR left a bad attitude in those proxy nations towards the western world, which will cause serious problems in the future – more than it already has.
There is good reason for fear.
It’s been 21 years since the Soviet Union fell. Most of us born in the ‘90s do not recall the Cold War itself, but we were born in its shadow, and it is impossible for us to get away from it. We were born in the wake of a great empire collapsing in on itself, and the ripples from that collapse have echoed long on into the waters of our lives, and continue to disperse out across the pond.
