The Millennium Arrives: November 9, 1989
I was born the summer the Berlin Wall went up, into a world shadowed by the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. Many people then expected a nuclear war was imminent and that such a war could mean the end of the world. People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. In the early sixties, international politics seemed deadlocked, but elsewhere things were stirring. The civil rights movement had already transformed the status quo into a crisis, not only for the officials dealing with demonstrators but for Americans whose conscience had woken up or whose patience had worn out.
That year Women’s Strike for Peace was founded when a hundred thousand women in a hundred communities across the country staged a simultaneous one-day strike, launching an antinuclear peace movement that also prefigured the women’s movement soon to be born. That year, Cesar Chavez was considering leaving his community organizer job to try to unionize California’s farm workers, and the science writer Rachel Carson was finishing Silent Spring, her landmark denunciation of pesticides published in 1962. Just as the civil rights movement achieved not only specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice, so Carson’s book was instrumental not only in getting DDT banned in the United States—which reversed the die-offs of many species of bird—but also in popularizing a worldview in which nature was made up not of inert objects but of interactive, interconnected systems, a worldview that would come to be called ecological. Step by step, ecological ideas have entered the mainstream to transform the imagination of the earth and its processes, of fire, water, air, soil, species, interdependences, biodiversities, watersheds, food chains (these latter words also entered the common vocabulary in recent times). In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society, the key organization for the student movement in the United States, was founded, and the environmental movement began to matter in public imagination and public discourse.
I was born into a world in which there was little or no recourse and often not even words for racial profiling, hate crimes, domestic violence, sexual harassment, homophobia, and other forms of exclusion and oppression. In my own country, which considered itself then as now a bastion of democracy, some of the Ivy League universities did not admit women, many of the Southern colleges and universities only admitted whites, and quite a few elite institutions still banned Jews. It was a world where the scope for decisions about religion, sexuality, living arrangements, food, and consumption patterns was far narrower, though there were also many old ways of life disappearing. Pristine wildernesses, family farms, small businesses, independent media, local customs, and indigenous practices were under siege by the homogenizations, consolidations, and commercializations that would supernova into corporate globalization, and the very premises from which to resist these eradications were still mostly embryonic. This is the way the world changes, as Dickens understood when he opened his most political novel with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It usually is.
What gets called “the sixties” left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness. The answers—the alternatives— haven’t always been clear or easy, but the questions and the questioning are nevertheless significant. What’s most important here is to feel the profundity of the changes, to feel how far we have come from that moment of Cold War summer. We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.
I was born the summer the Berlin Wall went up, and I cried when I saw live footage of it coming down twenty-eight years later, on November 9, 1989. The massive wall had seemed eternal, like the Cold War itself, and the East Germans streaming across and the people celebrating in the streets were amazed, delighted, moved beyond imagining. East German authorities had given permission for orderly traffic across the wall, not for its eradication as a boundary altogether. It was because so many people showed up on both sides that the guards surrendered control altogether. People armed with nothing more than desire or hope brought down the wall. It was a year of miracles, if change wrought by determination against overwhelming odds can be a miracle and perhaps the greatest year of revolutions ever, greater than in 1848, far greater than in 1775 or 1789. In May the students of Tiananmen Square had mounted the first direct challenge to the authority of the Chinese government, and though they were defeated, they were only the first of a series of revolutions, or revelations. At the end of 1989, Nelson Mandela was released from his South African prison after almost three decades behind bars.
Central Europe liberated itself that fall, one nation after another, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (which later divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), using festively and bravely the nonviolent techniques wrought in other parts of the world. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the Soviet Union collapsed too, or rather was dismantled by the will of the people and the guidance of the extraordinary president then, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his will to let go of power. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas of 1991. Some of the revolutions came about as the result of increasingly bold democratic organizing, notably that of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, where free elections were held that June after a decade of carefully laid groundwork. But others were more surprising, more spontaneous. The marches in the streets, the insistence of people upon exercising their rights as citizens, the sudden coming to voice of the voiceless, were central acts in a moment when a world order seemed at the edge of collapse. By acting as if they were free, the people of Eastern Europe became free.
Often the road to the future is through the past. Thus it was that in Hungary and Czechoslovakia marches commemorating political martyrs turned into nonviolent revolutions freeing the living. Often the road to politics is through culture. It was, for example, the 1976 persecution of the Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe that sparked Charter 77, the defiant manifesto issued on the New Year, some of whose signatories were key players in 1989. “It was not a bolt out of the blue, of course,” wrote Charter signatory and playwright Vaclav Havel long before he became president of a postcommunist Czechoslovakia, “but that impression is understandable, since the ferment that led to it took place in the ‘hidden sphere,’ in that semi-darkness where things are difficult to chart or analyze. The chances of predicting the appearance of the Charter were just as slight as the chances are now of predicting where it will lead.”
One could trace the equally strange trajectory that created rock and roll out of African and Scots-Irish musical traditions in the American South, then sent rock and roll around the world, so that a sound that had once been endemic to the South was intrinsic to dissent in Europe’s east. Or the ricocheting trajectory by which Thoreau, abolitionists, Tolstoy, women suffragists, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and various others had over the course of more than a century wrought a doctrine of civil disobedience and nonviolence that would become standard liberatory equipment in every part of the world. If atomic bombs are the worst invention of the twentieth century, this practice might be the best, as well as the antithesis of those bombs. Or perhaps the music should be counted too. (That both the civil rights movement and rock-and-roll came out of the African American South to change the world suggests a startling, resistant richness under all that poverty and oppression and evokes, yet again, the strange workings of history.) The new era in which we’re living did not come into being on the uneventful day of January 1, 2000 (or 2001, for those who are picky about calendric time). It came into being in stages, and is still being born, but each of these five dates—in 1989, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2003—constitutes a labor pang, an emergence out of emergency. The millennium was long anticipated as a moment of arrival, as the end of time, but it is instead a beginning of sorts, for something that is increasingly recognizable but yet unnamed, yet unrecognized, a new ground for hope.