Skip to content

A helluva century

My second dose of vaccine is Wednesday. The end of the pandemic is still months away. And a return to normal? If anything, it will be a new normal.

A daily walk has helped keep me sane over the year-plus of COVID-19 quarantine. I walk fast, just over four miles in an hour. It must look like a fast march because yesterday a guy in his yard called out, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”

The song identified with World War I is from just over a hundred years ago. Having the song title shouted at me set the tribulations of our present age in broader context. If you had been born just early enough to have remembered that war, say, in 1912, what might you have seen in your life? I made a short list.

WWI
Spanish Flu pandemic
Lynchings by the thousands
Advent of broadcast radio
Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight
“Talkies”
Great Depression bread lines

The New Deal
Rise of Nazism and fascism
WWII
Pearl Harbor
The Final Solution
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The beginning of the Cold War
Polio epidemics
Berlin airlift
Television
Cuban Missile Crisis
March on Washington
JFK assassination
Bloody Sunday
Watts riots
MLK assassination
RFK assassination
Moon landing
Watergate
Iran hostage crisis
Invention of personal computers
The end of the Cold War
Clinton impeachment
September 11 attacks

You’d have been 89 in 2001 if you’d lived to see the World Trade Towers come down.

I don’t know whether to feel better about the Great Recession, Trumpism, the covid pandemic, and the Jan. 6 insurrection or apprehensive about what comes next.

When finally I looked, it turns out “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was first performed in 1912.

Published inUncategorized