Twenty-Five Years of the Worst Timeline

I was there.

Twenty-five years ago, I was there. I was living in Brooklyn, and taking the N and the R into the city every weekday morning to work. I saw it all happen because, as anyone who was there can tell you, it was a beautiful clear blue sky that morning. Not a cloud in sight and visibility clear across the whole city. And taking the train across the bridge, you could see the entire skyline in picture-perfect clarity.

I've written about it enough over the years to not ever really have to go into details again. It affected me, and everyone else there. We all walked back over the bridge to get home, millions of people on foot with military planes and helicopters circling above. Doctors were handing out water bottles at each end of the bridge and helping anyone with difficulties.

I've said enough about that particular day for the last two and a half decades.

But I will say this in general: That's when I consider everything started.

This timeline we're in? The one we all complain about? How America lost it's goddamned mind? It all started that day. Those wonderful 90s? They ended that day. Pretty much everything bad about America really started to coalesce, form, grow, and then explode after that day. The rise of social media brainwashing people into becoming complete idiots; the entire economic system collapsing; the military paper tiger; the rise of populism; the conspiracy theories.

Now, if you had lived through the 90s, you'd be pointing out that militias existed and that we did have Timothy McVeigh and other idiots. And we had the whole "Whitewater Scandal" and other accusations against the Clintons. Yes, we did. But it wasn't going anywhere fast. In fact, it had ebbed quite a bit after McVeigh. Militias were discredited completely and some were even shutting down because they no longer had recruits. It was being handled. They got nowhere near taking over the government. And most people weren't taking the conspiracy theories very seriously. They weren't pervasive in society. We weren't voting for populists because times were pretty good. At least, they were compared to today.

I'm saying this as someone who not only was there on 9/11, but as someone who was there on Capitol Hill during the 90s and covering them for various publications as a photojournalist. I was there almost every day, covering the political scene. I used to know Dole, Gingrich, McCain, Biden, and many others by name. They recognized me and my little Leica on my shoulder even while I was using two big Nikon cameras to shoot most of my shots.

So I can tell you, first hand, that it wasn't the same. The "Contract with America" - I was there for that. It wasn't close to what we have now. I'd take those days again any day over what we have now. And, all in all, Clinton won all of those battles, not the Republicans.

The last few days, I had a thought. Maybe it was a bad one but it was a thought nonetheless. When most people get the option of answering what they would do with a time machine, they answer that they would go back in time and shoot Hitler. I wouldn't. I'd do something else entirely, and I'll explain:

Much as I would love to have killed Hitler (and being from a Jewish family, I don't think I'd ever need a philosophical debate on the subject), WWII was already over twenty five years before I was born. It was a done deal. My killing him wouldn't have changed the fact that we had won. And out of winning, we had produced something amazing: eighty years of building a system which everyone, globally, could rely on. Yes, it had large flaws - everyone knows this. It wasn't always true to its word. But it was the start of something truly international. We had a world economy for the first time in the entire world. We had rules for shipping and air travel and transport. We had international codes which we could cite in courts of law across every single country, excepting North Korea and maybe a couple of other places. Because of that, even our enemies relied on it for their own economic utility and stability. It was an amazing system and just as amazing as all of the hundreds of thousands of people who helped to set it up.

And now, it's all going away. Everyone who is sane, rational, and thinking knows why. Life, as you know it, is slowly disintegrating and then more quickly tumbling down that hill like a huge unstoppable boulder. That isn't twenty-five years before I was born - it's now.

Granted, something better may come of this, but I don't know that. And I don't know how many deaths it will take to create it - if it ever can be created again in our lifetimes. I don't think that it can. I studied the fall of the Roman Empire when I was in school, and since, and I wondered what it would have been like to live under such times. I no longer wonder. And it's happening at hundreds of times the speed than it did back then, because communication happens within micro-seconds.

So, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and prevent 9/11. That's what I'd do. I'd prevent the shitty timeline that we're in right now. We wouldn't spend trillions on useless wars breaking our economy, leading to the rise of nationalism which got Trump elected. And because of that, times would have been better and people wouldn't have been as susceptible to conspiracy theories, and we'd be far less distracted with wars to actually deal with the problem of the tech companies who pushed the worst of public excrement in our faces for decades without ever getting more than a slap on the wrist.

At least, that's what I think I'd do now. Perhaps you disagree. I don't know. I just know that on this day, twenty-five years ago, the world changed for the worst and we're still living through the effects of it today, and it doesn't appear that it will end anytime soon.

– N.