History really is just what happens around us and it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 80, something big’s happened during your lifetime.
Obviously the longer you’ve been around the more stuff that’s likely to have happened.
Here at the South West Voice we have reached the exalted state known as three score years, which makes you sound really ancient.
Guilty as charged, Your Honour.
At dinner the other night with a friend who’s also just reached that milestone a few days ago, we reflected on all the big events which have occurred during our lifetime.
So this is his and my Top 5, if you’re younger or older than three score years go get your own list.
Number 1. Almost 50 years ago in July 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. The Russians had landed an unmanned spacecraft on the moon 10 years earlier, but seeing black and white pictures of humans hopping around moon craters was just awesome, especially if you were a 14 year old kid. An indelible memory.
Number 2. It’s incredible to think that a little over eight years ago the iphone did not exist. If I had a dollar for every time I hear someone say, half jokingly: How did we ever survive before the iphone arrived … add affordable, easy to use tablets and laptop computers and you have a game changer.
Number 3. In 1960 America elected arguably its greatest president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose message of peace and prosperity for humanity resonated across the globe. JFK was as popular as a rock star and had the trophy wife to go with it. But someone, somewhere saw Kennedy as a threat to their interests so they assassinated him in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. Everyone who was alive then, even eight year olds, remembers where they were the moment Kennedy was assassinated.
Number 4. The electric car hasn’t taken the world by storm but it’s not too far away. Incredible to think we will be able to run billions of vehicles without running out of fuel but also dramatically reduce pollution by not using fossil fuels. A great new way to get around and we save the world at the same time, now that’s a big moment in history.
Number 5. Knocking down the Berlin wall, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the end for communism. If you grew up in the 1960s the Cold War was at its height and fuelled by a MAD assumption – Mutually Assured Destruction; communism was entrenched and looking like it would go on for ever and its symbol was the Berlin Wall. And yet in 1989 the whole edifice came tumbling down. Just like that.
