For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’m working on republishing a book, and the process has caused me to stop and think about how much the world has changed.
The story was written in 2000 and takes place in that same year. The publisher is no longer in business, so the story is mine to do with as I wish. While a graphic artist is creating a new cover and updating the page design, I’m re-reading the previous edition to check for typos and mistakes that might have slipped by the first time. I’d already found a few errors after it was published, so I’ve been prepared for this day.
What I haven’t been prepared for so much is how our world has changed in the past 24 years. For example, in 2000 we had no social media. There was no Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Spotify, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram or LinkedIn. There was only something called Six Degrees, which started in 1997 and was shut down in 2001.
In 2000, the world wide web was just nine years old. Apple’s eWorld, one of the first online email and internet services, had already come and gone by that time. I was a member, and when Apple shut it down, they recommended their members join the much bigger and more successful AOL service, which I did. Don’t laugh but I’m still there.
In 2000, we had cell phones, but smartphones as we know them didn’t exist. The first camera phone became available in 2000, but cell phone access to the internet — which marked the very definition of “smartphone” — didn’t happen until 2001.
Elsewhere in history, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 hadn’t happened yet. We could still meet travelers at their airport gates, and we didn’t have to stand in long lines to go through security checkpoints at schools and sporting events. We hadn’t experienced a worldwide pandemic or an epidemic of gun violence. In 2000 we weren’t talking about global warming and weighing the costs and benefits of responses such as electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. Life was full speed ahead.
On-line shopping was mostly a dream in 2000 with Amazon only offering books, music, movies and video games. Shopping malls were still king, and grocery stores and drive-thru windows were still the best way to bring food home.
In 2000, our politics were already scandal-ridden and mean-spirited – they always have been — but that could only be learned about on the network news and in the daily newspapers or grocery store tabloids because social media had yet to create legions of citizen journalists and influencers. Our voting was mostly in person, but it wasn’t without problems. Anyone recall Bush vs. Gore and the debacle of hanging chads after the 2000 election?
I list all of this because as I’ve reread my story, I’ve had to push back against the desire to pull the characters and their actions forward into the current day. It’s fiction, of course, and I could rewrite it for the modern day, but the story is about what happened to people in that time. Those people are shaped by the conditions in which they were living and the history they were making at that time. To move it from 2000 to 2024 would result in a very different story.
Likewise, as much as we might want to rewrite our own story, we can’t. What happened in the past and who we were at that time can’t be changed.
However, that doesn’t mean we’re stuck like characters in a historical drama who never progress beyond “The End.” We can learn from what we’ve experienced, where we’ve been, and what we’ve seen and done. We can acknowledge our mistakes, learn from them, and commit ourselves to not repeating them. We can ask for forgiveness for our shortsightedness and pray for the courage and strength to work toward a future that is better not just for ourselves but for everyone.
We can do all that and more because the “author” of our story is still writing with us and for us.