It was May 2001 and I was taking World History when I heard the worst prediction in my life. Nothing has come close to matching how wrong this teacher was.
It was near the end of the semester, and we were in the 80s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The teacher was very proud of the fact that he had a piece of it which he brought like show and tell.
As he passed an unremarkable bit of cement from hand to hand, he said the most incorrect statement I have ever heard in my entire life about anything ever.
“The fall of the Berlin wall was the most significant historical event to happen within my lifetime. Probably within yours as well.”
REMEMBER THE OPTIMISM?
If you are too young to remember the 90s, or heaven forbid, you weren’t even born in the 90s, there was a real sense of optimism.
Yes, the Dot Com crash kind of wrecked the economy for a hot second. And yes Y2K and the turn of the new millennium potentially would’ve wrecked all our computers, but that was a false alarm. Yes, we just elected a president that had lost the popular vote and probably also lost the electoral college but we didn’t actually count all the votes. And yes being gay was still illegal in a lot of states. And being any kind of minority might as well have been illegal in a lot of states.
But we didn’t have the kind of hyper-connected social media saturated world, so we were still getting the official version of history, which was very optimistic.
REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
The infamous Berlin Wall comment was made in May of 2001. Remember what happened in September?
At the time of his statement, I smiled and nodded and genuinely believed him, because again, I was still used to smiling and nodding and believing Authority figures about their take on the world.
There were very few places to learn anything to the contrary. The internet was still the Internet Movie Database, some janky chat rooms, amateur sites about extremely niche passion topics, and a bunch of businesses putting up one-page websites with a phone number to call if you wanted to conduct any actual business.
As I watched the two towers fall, the first thing that popped into my head was his declaration.
And then we declared war on a country where Osama bin Laden wasn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall. But that country did have nuclear weapons. Except they didn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall.
Every time something historic happens in the ever-increasing avalanche of events that change everything, from elections to pandemics to electronics, I hear his voice in my head.
HISTORY WILL NEVER BE OVER
That throwaway comment is probably the single thing I think about the most from all of my education.
It’s helped me mostly avoid giant pronouncements, I hope. But it also helped me speak a little more freely as well.
Because we’re going to get this wrong. We don’t know what happens next. We can extrapolate. But how many trendlines are going off the rails? The world looks nothing like it did. It’s not a logical progression.
WHAT WILL THE TRULY MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENT BE?
It also has me wondering what really will be the most significant historical event in my lifetime.
I don’t think any of us alive today are going to know. When we look back at history the moments that truly change everything can seem so insignificant.
Hitler is elected chancellor instead of drummed out of town. A dude named Watts figures out a more efficient steam engine and launches the Anthropocene age and the industrial revolution. A super cold winter froze the Rhine, allowing Germanic tribes to bypass the usual Roman defenses keeping them north and destroyed the Roman Empire.
The moments of significance are never once we think they are.
What is the worst take you’ve ever heard on a subject? Let me know!