Maybe this change will be a good one; people will be free from that beginning/end feeling of something that happened almost two decades ago, and the loose chain reaction of events that followed.
But if you were looking for a bright line dividing one generation to the next, here is one. A shared experience of most older millennials is this: that they were at school, or on their way to school, or getting ready for school, when 9/11 happened. That demarcation, concentrated at the tail-end of that generation, offers a prism for understanding the intervening years. Maybe that weird and jagged half-decade of culture would have followed anyway without 9/11 and the Iraq War, but it probably would not have been so weird and jagged; maybe Obama would have run and been so appealing to so many millennials in 2008, but he probably would not have carried that enveloping sense of cultural cohesion for the people who got caught up in it, after the dearth of cohesion post-9/11; and maybe we still would have done the waves of illusory ’90s nostalgia, followed by the ’90s and ’00s backlash of the last two years in politics, from Clinton and Bush to Bernie to Trump, but the backlash might not have been as hard.
No one can really know the difference, right? No one will be able to definitively say what it’s like to be with or without a memory of 9/11 against the other. But if you have one, can you imagine existing without it?
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