The Anniversary Party
For nearly twenty-four hours between yesterday evening and this afternoon, BTW South was without internet access. This was a nuisance not a crisis, but predictably it did get me thinking about the changes wrought by the passage of time. Ten years ago, in March 1997, President Clinton was less than two months into his second term; few had yet heard of George W. Bush, the first-term Governor of Texas; Barry Sanders was the the best running back in the NFL; two brand-new episodes of Star Trek aired each week, one each of Deep Space Nine and Voyager; the Special Editions of the Star Wars trilogy had just been released in theaters and there was yet no prequel trilogy; and the internet, or as it was called back then the "information superhighway," had yet to "transform" our daily lives.

My father had bought his first HAL by 1997 and had created for each member of the family, even my long-absent sister, an AOL e-mail account, but I dialed in to check mine perhaps a half-dozen times in as many months. I would not become a regular user of what was quickly dubbed ye olde internet until I arrived at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 1997. A scant two years later, by the time the Mountain of Love was a high school senior, he and his compatriots routinely chatted through AIM. Back in my day, we called each other on the telephone. (Or rather, Skeeter or Dylweed, not yet a daddy, called me and I told them I was going to stay in and hang out with my brother; so, not everything has changed in ten years.) And by the telephone I mean the landline in our parents' houses. To quote RBF, "We didn't call have 'cell phones'!"

In 1997, being without internet access for a day would not have seemed worth even mentioning; yesterday, I could not check my myriad email acccounts, obsessively visit The Secret Base to see if anyone had left a comment, read things about the Romulans that I already know on Wikipedia, scan the headlines of the BBC site. None of these activities is vital; a convincing argument can be made than none of them is even vaguely important. The internet is, by and large, a collection fo trivialities. Of course, as the finest Trivial Pursuit player I know, I would never speak out against trivialities; the trivial is the color and excitement of the world. I mean, was 300 a valid history lesson? By Zeus's thunderbolt, no! But was it a heck of a lot of fun? You betcha!

The Secret Base of the Rebel Black Dot Society was founded five years ago. I was introduced to the term "Black Dot Society," against which I am in rebellion, seven years before that. The world, or rather that small fraction with which I interact daily, changed far more between 1997 and 2002 than between 2002 and 2007. I have no highfalutin purpose beyond stating that I believe we all derive inestimable benefit from taking a few moments each day to hold in mind a picture of how we once were, individually and as a culture, and asking why we are not that way today, both for good and for ill.