Milestones

by Gary White

There are events that stand out in my memory so starkly that I know exactly what I was doing at the moment. These milestones mark moments when I sensed that everything would be different from that moment on.

On April 12, 1945 I was sitting on the floor of our living room across the street from the telephone office in Cedar Vale, Kansas listening to the radio. A news flash interrupted the music programming to inform me and the world that President Roosevelt had died. Since he had been president for my entire life, I didn’t know what to think. Was it the end of the world? No, things pretty much went on with little change and the event faded into history.

On November 22, 1963 I had my high school choir from Dolores, Colorado down in Cortez rehearsing for a massed choir festival to be held that evening. We took a break for lunch and the news was relayed to us that President Kennedy had been shot. All the directors got together to decide what we were going to do—should we continue rehearsing and go on with the concert? Should we all go home and reschedule the event for some time later? If so, when? There was a lot of discussion about the difficulties of finding another time in all the various high school schedules and some sentiment for simply going ahead. However, the consensus that developed was that we would postpone the event for some future, undetermined time. We simply couldn’t think of going on after the event in Dallas. Of course, it was impossible to reschedule and that choir festival never happened. Was this the end of an era? How would the world change from that moment in time? Well, change it did, but not catastrophically. The event, however, didn’t fade into history and questions continue to be raised about what happened that day in Dallas, Texas. Our lives settled back into their usual routine and little changed from day to day.

On September 11, 2001 my daughter and her partner were visiting us in Boulder, Colorado. They were sleeping in late that morning and I was on the computer looking at the morning news. I read about the first plane flying into the World Trade Center tower and ran immediately to turn on the television. I was watching the event live when the second plane impacted the other tower and I continued to watch as the towers began to fall. By that time my daughter was up and I told her that this was truly the end of an era and that our individual and collective futures would be different than before that morning. So far, that prediction has proven accurate. Now I am reminded of the current “threat” level every time I go to an airport to fly. I have to take off my shoes to go through security and have had my luggage opened and pawed through by strangers more times than I can remember. Only time will tell if my prediction of the end of an era will prove true.

Other events are not so easy to pinpoint. Where were you on the day that global warming started? Where were you on the day that the delicate balance that must be sustained for us humans to survive on this planet was irreversably tipped? Or, has that day happened yet? Now that is a milestone to watch for. Where will you be on that day?