Generational Milestones

For much of my life, we've been looking for generational milestones, saying, "Is this it?  Is this our Pearl Harbor moment?  The where were you when Kennedy was shot moment?"  Maybe instead of the royal "we," I should speak only for myself.  Is it because I read voraciously as a child?  Is it because I overheard grown ups talking, as bookish children often do?

I knew early on that September 11, 2001 was this kind of milestone, the event that cracks the world into "before" and "after."  Even today, almost 25 years later, I can still recall almost every minute of that day, and I do mean this literally.

This morning I've been listening to various podcasts about Iran.  I am wondering if generations after us will see the 1979 take over of the U.S. Embassy in Iran as a generational marker.  I remember that the television was on in the living room of the house on the Outer Banks where my family was having a week-end get away with another family.  There was a "breaking news" interruption, and my dad moved closer to the T.V.  He recognized the serious nature of events, but I think we all thought it would be settled quickly.

I am thinking about historical regimes, how we see them differently now than their citizens might have seen them.  Of course, it's much more complicated the further back we go.  Citizens of Rome would not have had the kind of daily/hourly news updates that we have now.

I'm not naive--I do realize that the news updates that we get aren't always reliable.  In the days of escalation to the Iraq war, I remember Colin Powell's address to the U.N., and I assumed he was telling the truth.  He might have left out classified information, sure, but of course we could trust the information that we got in that kind of speech.

I do think that people like Colin Powell were telling the truth as they knew it at the time.  We may not see it as true now, with more than 20 years of follow up information.  This time, because I've heard so many different strands of information, some of which seems to contradict each other, I'm less inclined to think I'm hearing the truth.  

What's more accurate probably:  the truth will shift, and right now, no one is sure what is true, with the possible exception of some top level people who have access to some top level classified documents--and even those are subject to interpretation (I'm thinking of satellite data and intelligence reports).

I am looking at the full moon outside of my writing window and reflecting on the fact that the same moon has shown down us throughout all of human history, as we go back and forth, making the same mistakes over and over again, stumbling over milestones that we may not even recognize as milestones until generations later.