Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when the Towers fell? Where were you when the Queen died?
These are the questions that define, in sharp red lines, before and after. Ends of eras. The major story of a generation. Or, well...
If you spend any time on any kind of social media site, you've seen the memes. The plague memes, the "I'm tired of living through a major historical moment every two days" memes, so many memes... (We have to laugh at it because otherwise we'll cry.)
And maybe my generation and the next are overreacting. Maybe the generation that lived through the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, Watergate, maybe they felt the same way... except that I recently asked a former colleague - a Baby Boomer and a history professor - and she agreed that this is the toughest era she's lived through.
I was 19 on 9-11.
Katrina hit when I was 24.
The economy collapsed when I was 26.
I could keep going, could keep listing everything that's happened in my adult life that has made it seem like these are "the worst of times," but even just trying to type up a list of everything that has happened in the past two years would take Billy Joel several reprises of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
The storms, the mass shootings, the pandemic, the elections, the insurrection, the protests... they all blend together. They're all too much. You can only keep so many major events in your mind at once.
Does anyone remember that Notre Dame Cathedral caught on fire during Holy Week three years ago? That should have been a defining "where were you" moment.
Does anyone remember that just a couple months ago the Leeds (U.K.) airport had to shut down because the runways MELTED due to the unprecedented heat wave?
What does this have to do with writing? It comes back to that whole "fiction has to be believable" idea. You cram all this into a book, into a T.V. show and people are going to shake their heads and go, "Man, Season 3 of 'The 2020's' has really gone off the rails."
But we call these generation-defining events because they are. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis wrote hopeful books about triumphing over good and evil after they witnessed the horrors of World War I. The generation who watched us begin exploring Earth's orbit and the moon wrote the idealistic Sci-Fi of Star Trek and Star Wars.* But what are we writing now? Dystopian, post-apocalyptic, zombies... Here's hoping Gen Z can pull a Tolkien and turn all this generation-defining mess into something hopeful and positive.
*When I say "Star Wars," I am referring to the original trilogy unless I specify otherwise.