My twelfth birthday was in 2002, and the social forces and historical events of that year had, and still have an undeniable and lasting effect on my life as it is today and as it will be for some time to come. To illustrate this point, I’ll use my newly-discovered “sociological imagination” to explain how 2002 will probably always be with me.
I turned 12 not quite six months after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. The year 2002 was largely dominated by the aftermath and response to those horrible events. The 9/11 attacks instantly became the kind of life event that people experience and remember all their lives in a phenomenon psychologists call “flashbulb memories.” A flashbulb memory remains exceptionally vivid for all of one’s life, is remembered with unusually accuracy. Other examples are the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 (my parent’s flashbulb memory) and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942 (my grandparents’ flashbulb memory). But for my generation, the flashbulb memory is 9/11. The events of 9/11 had lasting effects on my life beyond my ability to remember exactly when and where I first learned of the attacks and to recall so vividly the reactions of my parents, teachers and friends to these events as well as the endless coverage on television. The 9/11 attacks also set in motion a powerful cascade of important political, economic, and social developments that were mostly outside of any one person’s control, and especially that of a 12-year-old girl. Many of these events occurred in 2002 and continue to shape my life today. I will discuss a few of them here.
Wars and their Effects: Although the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its allies to wipe out the al Qaida training camps and Taliban operations there began late in 2001, the year 2002 was dominated by these military efforts. When the initial invasions occurred, the expectation was that these operations would be relatively quick and successful. The belief was that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan and that the allied forces would quickly figure out where he was and kill or capture him. No one seriously thought that this war would still be going on 10 years later or that it would take 10 years to deal with bin Laden. Evidence of this was that on January 29, 2002, in his State of the Union Speech, U.S. President George W. Bush promised to expand the “war on terrorism” and designated Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.” Presumably, at this point when the War in Afghanistan was just a month or two old, it was still the prevailing belief of the Bush Administration that this war would be over soon, and that the country should turn its attention to rooting out terrorist threats in those other three “evil” countries.
The year 2002 was also characterized by the lead-up to the War in Iraq, especially in the last few months of 2002. On September 12, 2002 President Bush addressed the United Nations and called for a “regime change” in Iraq (advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein). In November of 2002, the United Nations passed a resolution saying that Iraq must cooperate with the United Nations inspections for weapons of mass destruction or else face serious consequences. Iraq agreed to the U.N. resolution a few days later, and later that month, U.N. weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq to look for “WMD”. None were found in 2002 or, for that matter, ever. Yet the train had left the station leading up to a very costly War in Iraq, which is still going on today.
The War in Afghanistan being fought in 2002 and the War in Iraq which started soon after that, have had enormous lasting political, social and economic effects on our lives. It is hard to realize that the United States has been at war since before I even became a teenager. Men and women who, like me, were in the sixth grade in 2002 have fought in those wars, been traumatized by them, been permanently injured by them, or have died in them. I am so lucky none of those things happened to me or my loved ones, but we all owe a tremendous debt to those who serve. My generation has not experienced what it is like to live in a country at peace since 2001 when we were children. These wars and their effects largely define our lives today in many ways. Those wars are a very big reason that the economy is so precarious todaym making it increasingly hard for my generation to find jobs when we graduate from college or graduate school or even to afford to live on our own instead of mooching off of our parents. Consider that the unemployment rate in 2002 was 5.8%, compared to almost 10% today. Stating an exact cost for these two wars is difficult because the Bush Administration did not include them in the federal budget for eight years. They were instead financed sort of off the books, and borrowing for them did a lot to run up the trillions of dollars of federal deficit we hear so much about today, and that is dragging our country down. The federal debt in 2002 was 6.228 billion, a number which probably sounded big then, but we would take it in a heartbeat today!
Protecting the Homeland from Me: On November 25, the Homeland Security Act was signed into law. It created the largest government agency in the U.S. For all of 2002, air travel was characterized by greatly increased security measures following 9/11. My brother was married in Philadelphia just two weeks after 9/11, and my parents and I were among the first Americans to fly on commercial airplanes following the attacks. I remember the increased security, and feeling very nervous getting on the airplane. I saw my parents and everyone else looking around the plane nervously, trying to see if anyone looked like someone who would hijack the plane and fly it into a building, and I was doing the same thing. At that time, I think we were basically looking for people who looked like they might be from the Middle East. Call it early racial profiling, I guess. In the summer of 2002, I had surgery on my foot that involved placing a metal pin in my foot along the third metatarsal. The recovery was eight weeks on crutches, which seemed forever. My Mom decided to take me to Michigan to visit my grandmother, so we had to go through airport security in Minneapolis, wheelchair, crutches and all. It was then that I learned that I look like someone from the Middle East. (I am actually a Roma from Romania.) I was subjected to extensive and invasive scrutiny, despite my age and obvious disability. I had many thoughts about that pin in my foot that was ruining my summer, but hijacking an airplane was certainly not one of them! I remember taking it very personally at the time. Since then, I can't help but notice that I almost always seem to get selected for extra security when I fly anywhere. I now understand that it is not personal. It is just that I look like a member of a group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and there is nothing I can do about it.
More Terror Attacks,More Fear, and a New Approach to Foreign Travel: Terror attacks were never far from people’s minds in 2002. People were made uneasy by bomb attacks on a nightclub area in Bali on October 12, killing mostly foreign tourists and by sniper attacks in the Washington D.C. area beginning on October 2 and continuing for about three weeks. The Bali bombs were indeed the work of al Qaeda, but the sniper attacks were found to have no connection to Muslim extremism beyond the religious background of one of the two snipers. Nonetheless, these terror attacks unnerved Americans everywhere. My brother and his wife had initially planned to take their honeymoon in Bali, but postponed their trip after 9/11. They had hoped to take this trip in 2002, but decided to go skiing in New England instead. The Bali bombing just confirmed their choice. This terror attack and the many on tourist centers around the world that have occurred since then have changed the nature of foreign travel for Americans. My family likes to travel and does so frequently, but since 9/11, we are more vigilant about choosing where and when we go, and how we dress and behave when we are abroad. We follow one rule above all: We try not to look like Americans. It has nothing to do with us as individuals, but it has everything to do with our culture and our status as Americans and how that is perceived by others and how it affects our safety.
No Child Left Behind Leaves Me Behind: On January 8, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Legislation. This set in motion an increased emphasis on standardized testing and education reform that has had a big effect on my life. Teachers started “teaching to the tests” and there seemed to be more of them than ever, with increasingly higher stakes. School curricula changed in response to the tests. Math and reading increased at the expense of social studies and science. Music, art and foreign language classes became harder to fit into schedules, sometimes being moved to after-school hours. Gym classes were dropped or greatly reduced in many schools. Gym class disappeared from my middle school entirely. As an athlete, this was a big disappointment to me, but I was lucky that my parents could provide lots of sports experiences to me through tennis lessons and through park and recreation sports teams. Others were not so lucky. The removal of physical education from schools was probably a big factor in the obesity epidemic in young people today.
NCLB had another shaping impact on my life. I suffer from test anxiety. I go weak at the knees at the sight of #2 lead pencils and bubble sheets, and dread that eerie noisy “silence” of the large testing hall with the clock, the test proctors, and all the sights, sounds and smells that come with those tests. NCLB was my worst nightmare. The passage of this legislation 10 years ago did nothing to help me conquer this anxiety; it just made it worse. Now there were even more standardized tests. I never did well on these tests. Of course being nervous didn't help. It now occurs to me that perhaps the schools were so overwhelmed by all the requirements that they just didn’t do a very good job of preparing us for them anyway. It's the subject of much debate whether NCLB really has done anything to improve the educational attainment of American students. The results, as they say, are mixed at best.
To this day, I do what I can to avoid standardized tests, and I have planned my future around avoiding them. For example, I am shaping my graduate school plans by figuring out programs that do not require the GRE exam. Ironically, I have pretty much decided to become a school counselor to try to do for other kids with testing issues what no one did for me: help them conquer their testing fears. If we are going to live in an educational system that is determined to test the living bejeebers out of our kids, I hope to do my best to help kids survive it better than I did. Who knows? Maybe our textbook is right in saying that “We as individuals can affect the very social structure that affects us” (Newman, 2010, p. 47). I can try to change the test-test-test atmosphere, or at least help students learn to cope with it.
A Happier Note On Which To End: In 2002, Serena Williams beat her sister Venus to win the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. The emergence of the Williams sisters, black women who grew up poor in California and who learned to play tennis on run-down public courts, changed the shape of professional tennis forever. Tennis before the Williams was predominantly a very non-diverse sport played predominantly by rich white people. The successes of the William sisters (which continue to this day) changed perceptions of the sport for many. It inspired me to keep playing, despite often being the only minority on my teams, and showed me that achieving a very high level of skill in the game is not a matter of your race or background. It has everything to do with talent and hard work. Thank you Venus and Serena!
Work Cited:
Newman, D.M. (2010). Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. 8th Ed. Pine Forge Press: Thousand Oaks, California.
A note about other references:
The historical events I mention here are derived from the following lists of important events for 2002:
InfoPlease list for 2002 is found by clicking here: http://www.infoplease.com/linkagreement.html
Wikipedia also has a very extensive list found by clicking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002
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