This is the story of how the 70s sneaked up on me in a dark alley once.
I was born in 1977, but it was well into the 80s before I had a sense of the passage of time and the concept of decades. For me, “the 70s” was always a thing of the past. In fact, I thought of it as being completely past, over and done with. It was “old stuff”, like my parents. The Vietnam War was over and done with. Disco was over and done with. Hippies were over and done with. Anything from the 70s was “way back in the 70s”.
Okay, let’s fast forward a little bit. I became a teenager at the dawn of the 90s. The 90s were mine. While my childhood straddles two decades, I wholeheartedly consider myself a child of the 90s.
Fast forward to now. As I write this it’s 2017, and yet I have this sense that the 90s are right over there, just around the corner. Nevermind that it’s been literally 27 years since Madonna’s “Vogue” was the #1 hit.
As I sort through the social, emotional, and political landscape of my 2017, I’m aware of how relevant the 90s still are, one way or another. The politics of Bill Clinton make waves in the politics of today. Economic trends from the 90s ripple on to today. Music influences from the 90s live on in other music today. And of course, literally everything that happened in the 90s lives on in how it shaped the people alive at the time – people who are still alive and carry their memories and experiences with them.
The 90s aren’t over and done with, not by a long shot.
And that’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks:
As a child in the 80s and 90s, the 70s were RIGHT THERE! They were closer then than the 90s are to now. The 70s weren’t over and done with! Everything that had happened in the 70s was rippling through my life, even as I dismissed it as the old stuff of yore.
I guess it’s no big surprise that as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed an increasingly nuanced understanding of the passage of time. What once seemed like forever now seems like yesterday. The longer I live, the more I am able to see history as a something that stretches and intertwines and overlaps, not as something that begins and ends in little chunks.
In three years it will be the 20s again, and I think a lot of people are going to have these little crisises of space-time. The 1920s were “modern” in a way that, say, the 1890s weren’t. In the 1990s, nothing else in the popular imagination had ever been called the 90s before. But now we’re going to revisit the 20s, a decade that has already been named and defined.
I can’t wait to see how my concept of time keeps on changing as I try to keep up with the ever-expanding now.