How is today different from yesterday? How can I remember this year from any other of the past two decades? The changes aren't apparent on our streets. Looking out my window, my neighborhood could be confused with 2002, 2008, 2014, 2018. The first two decades of our second millennium flow indistinguishable from one another.
From my yard, a small fenced off patch of grass in front of my apartment, little of the street around me hints at the year. To the untrained eye, the old people's home next door looks as it has since its creation in the early seventies. The house across the street is a single story with a dish on top. A church with a high steeple hovers in the distance, the cross on top reaches me, as do the grey shingles of the megachurch roof.
To the untrained eye, a time traveler perhaps, would find it possible to judge the era based on its surroundings. The changes are here, but as everything about the new millennium, they are subtle and hidden. Software has overtaken hardware. The asphalt mixture of the roads is new, a combination that resists sun bleaching and the heavy load of a million cars passing a million times. Only one house has a satellite dish. Early in the millennium, it was all houses and apartments. Yet today, at the beginning of 2018, only one house on my entire street has one. The software inside has been upgraded. WiFi doesn't require a ludicrous bubble on a roof.
The only indicator that has consistently carried my generation is the automobile.
The buildings, the city, it mostly stay the static. So few buildings have been erected, and the few that have imitate the past. But the mixture in the asphalt is new, and so are the cars. We move faster and sleeker, weaving in and out of what already exists. Not changing it. No, we change little. It scares us. Instead, we add on, a drive through on this building, another one there. That is who we are in the first two decades of the millennium, creatures choosing to update oneself instead of the surroundings.
And because of this, America is best described by its cars. In Los Angeles, the rich and conscientious drive Teslas. Statements are made and maintained instinctively. Conscientious and okay drive Priuses. Rich and don't care rove in land rovers and sports cars. Okay and don’t care speed in Audis and Volkswagens. The poor immigrant drives Toyota. It doesn't matter where the immigrant is from, if they are poor they drive a Toyota: Mexican, Armenian, everyone from everywhere. Rich immigrants drive BMW.
And with each passing year, the cars get collectively sleeker. Chrome is added mid-decade and removed by its end. Smaller. Faster. New cars drive hard and reckless between old buildings that watch them pass and change with outstanding speed. By the end of the second-decade cars are big and ludacris again.
I've often said the if all cars were removed from the streets, living in the city would be indistinguishable from 2002 to now, 2018. Same people same styles. Same city same issues. Nothing has changed in American society in the last twenty years, nothing but our cars to separate us.
I don't know if this is a positive post or not. We're so caught up in the software, in our phones, that we don't notice the lack of progress, physically, around us because of the quick pace of "new" information.
Maybe as new money changed the old money of the past, America will again have a decade in the twenties that will change everything... Or nothing. To be fair, unless a historian is asked, there’s no palpable distinction from the 1900’s and the 1910’s ( it’s all the age of the great war).
Here's hoping the memes are right and there will be a new golden age.
izzy806
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