The Next Great Divide?

If history were a bajada, the decades since World War II would be a climb up a nearly featureless rise, chasing the low overcast that conceals mountains in our future.

We can look back in biographies and films and memories and say that the country and the world have changed a lot, even as we look down that steady rise of seven decades and see people in the past living about the same as they do now, and believing much of what they do now. The world has changed a lot and it hasn't changed much at all.

We can see repressive events from the 50s and 60s we now disown because we think we've outgrown them even as we hear similar murmurs of prejudice.

We can watch the face of America become more inclusive even as white faces struggle to retain dominance. 

We can witness the conquest of leisure time by communication devices invading hearth and hand and exposing us to more information even as we know less and less. 

And we can wonder what it must have been like to look for a phone booth instead of a lost cell phone.

But we can see it all, quite clearly, and feel comfortably familiar with it all, as if the parade of American time since the end of World War II was a long running play with many costume changes, the actors remaining the same and regurgitating similar lines over and over again. A visit to a second hand clothing store will suffice to throw us back decades in pretension, and a young pop singer can start a trend by dressing like Cary Grant for a young audience that can rent Cary Grant movies to watch on their mobile devices, thinking it cool to dress up instead of dressing down like their slob boomer parents.

Time has become a digital non linear editing bin, with easy access to any clip, providing the ability to assemble fragments in any order, mashing them up into transcendence of place and era.

Nearly seventy years have passed since the end of World War II. There's nothing one can point to in this bajada of history and say, on that day the world changed irrevocably. Over the course of seven decades, that day never happened. The collapse of two towers in Manhattan came very close, but over time all blended with two foreign wars that seemed too much like previous foreign wars, and the wounds smoothed over into familiar scars that came to resemble tattoos.

A lot did happen in those seven decades, of course, although most of it seems in retrospect even to those who lived through it like little more than gossip about times that refuse to be completely gone.

Here is a thought experiment: Think of someone who was celebrating the end of World War II, maybe a sailor and a nurse kissing in Times Square and photographed by Life Magazine, who might pause after the picture was taken to regard the previous seventy years, going back to 1875. That young sailor and nurse in 1945 have an equidistant timeline backward to frontier America and forward to our times, right now. They could not have forecast the subsequent 70 years but they could take stock of what the country had been through up to the moment of their embrace.

Count the Great Divides: The end of the frontier, the turbulence of industrialization and labor organization ending American innocence, the Great War to end all wars, a decade of roaring greed and licentious hypocrisy, ended by a devastating depression, itself ended by another global war that dwarfed the previous war only two decades earlier. If that sailor and nurse had kin threading through those seventy years, they could count a lot of endings and new beginnings in their family histories, especially the one that prompted their kiss.

We cannot say the same a decade and a half into the 21st Century. We cannot find Great Divides that separated time with a sharp ax of sudden change, chopping off yesterdays from the present, dismembering nostalgia, making memories five years past seem like lifetimes ago. 

When will the next Great Divide, long postponed, mark the end of our current time and the beginning of the next? When will the world suddenly never be the same, all our yesterdays irrelevant to our tomorrows? When will we cross a harsh and horrible mountain range and enter a new land, never looking back?