1989 (Thursday, March 1, 2007 - Community Editorial Board, Welland Tribune)
There are moments in a person's life that stand out more so than others.
Minutes, hours, days, years .... sometimes they can become repetitive; a monotonous rhythm that lulls us into an unremarkable grind. During those times, our lives just pass us by and we simply observe, as though we have no connection with our own experiences. We might as well be watching TV instead of living.
Other times, something so significant happens we are forever changed by it, and that time becomes frozen in our memory. I know it happened to my grandparents during the Second World War. My grandfather left the safety of Canada as a very young husband and father, and my grandmother became a supervisor in the Cotton Mill.
It happened to my dad during the Blizzard of 1977. At that time, he had a snow plowing business, among others, and he spent countless days and nights working.....without sleep, food or shelter to selflessly rescue people stuck in the snow. He in turn developed Type 1 Diabetes from the stress. He received police commendation for his sacrifice and heroism.
For me, the year was 1989. Away from home for the first time after growing up in a loving, protective family, I had just started at the University of Waterloo in September 1988. It was time for me to experience a world I hadn't known in high school, when teen dances and happy endings were the expectation, and I was never disappointed.
Suddenly, the universe seemed to be exploding. The World Wide Web appeared. The Exxon oil spill tainted the pristine Alaska coastline. Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy. The Berlin Wall was unceremoniously knocked down. The Chinese government open fired on students and peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Ted Bundy was executed after 10 years on Death Row. Dilbert was syndicated. Seinfeld, The Simpsons and When Harry Met Sally all premiered. Toronto SkyDome opened. Donald Barthelme died. And then in the same week: my friend, Ollie, unexpectedly and without any warning, collapsed and died in the middle of the Campus Centre. Then the encore, The Montreal Massacre.
That was certainly an insane year, and for me, life would never be the same.
I had declared English Literature my major so Barthelme's death was big news in my department at school. My friend, Lesley, was in Germany at the time and took pictures of the Berlin Wall as it came down. She got a piece of the wall and had it framed where it still hangs in her parents' home. For a holier-than-thou English Lit major, the World Wide Web was clearly only for computer geeks....certainly it had no use to someone like me. I watched the news of Tiananmen Square, the oil spill and Kosovo with a feeling of pity, self righteousness and immunity. Nothing like that would ever touch me. How could it?
Then December arrived and Ollie, incomprehensibly, died. The whole campus was in shock and mourning. Ollie was a bit of a celebrity, with his slicked black pompadour and thick black glasses. He spent weekend nights sitting on the steel stairs going down into Phil's Grandson's Place - the new cool hangout in Waterloo - because he wasn't old enough to drink and the owners would not allow him in. He sat on the stairs and watched from his perch, and all night people would go up the stairs to visit him. When he turned 19, the owners gave him a job there.
Everyone loved Ollie and his Ramone parties where everything in his place would be labeled with a Ramone sign - Lamp Ramone, Chair Ramone. The school newspaper and the local newspaper all wrote really nice articles about Ollie and people wrote letters to the editor to pay their respects and celebrate Ollie's life.
A week after Ollie died, a guy shot and killed 14 female university students in their Montreal classroom because he thought "feminists" ruined his life. And for me, that was it - the defining moment of the year. I wondered what kind of person blames a random group of people for his success or failure in life.
If he had instead had a wonderful, happy life, would he then also credit "feminists" for making his life successful? And why feminists? Did he really just mean all women? After all, he walked into a university and hand-selected women to kill....he purposely let the men in the classroom go so he could make his statement. I doubt he asked any of these women first if they were, in fact, feminists. What if he had walked into a Waterloo classroom? It could have been me.
Suddenly, I didn't recognize this world. Suddenly, I felt I didn't know who I was or what I should be doing.
Two things were very clear - whoever I thought I was before, well that was only a small part of the picture. And those events that I had thought were so far away and would never touch me suddenly seemed right beside me and more than capable of snatching away my life in the blink of an eye.
In any of the big news stories of that year, it could have been me who was affected.
During this time of my life, I was not merely observing, I was not a disinterested voyeur. I was absorbing, learning, discovering. I was getting schooled in the ways of the world, a world where my parents could not come to my rescue. I didn't even know it at the time but I was morphing into someone else ... the person I was meant to be, I guess.
As a society and as individuals, all we can ever count on or hope for is that things will change, that we will change. Whether or not those changes are for the better is up to each of us. We can't control what happens in the world, but we do have absolute dominion over our own lives. We decide every day whether we will watch or participate in our own lives. We decide if we will become tainted like that Alaska coastline.
The year 1989 taught me that yes, bad things are going to happen, but it's our responsibility to grow from these experiences. All the things that happen in the world contribute to who we are as individuals and as a culture.
We need to absorb all we can instead of letting the years pass us by while we passively observe.
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