FoxyJ is married and has two children. She lives in California and recently started a PhD program in Comparative Literature. When she has free time she enjoys reading, blogging, watching movies, and riding her bike. She has been blogging for about three years at Yellow Wallpaper.  Welcome FoxyJ!

In early August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. At the time my father was working as a military contractor, and by the end of August he was in Saudi Arabia with a group of Marines. My mom spent hours watching TV, often accompanied by a friend from our ward whose husband was also deployed. I was twelve years old, and for six months of my life the Gulf War formed the background to my awkward attempts to navigate junior high. I remember shaving my legs for the first time with CNN playing in the background. A little less than two years later, a jury acquitted four police officers accused in the beating of Rodney King. My mom and I were listening to the radio on our way to my orthodontist appointment. Los Angeles was already in flames by the time we got back in the car an hour later. The first presidential election I was eligible to vote in was Clinton versus Dole; I think I actually didn’t get around to voting since I was a brand-new freshman and maneuvering absentee balloting was over my head, but I was going to vote for Clinton. I’m not sure why exactly, probably just because I was raised by Democrats.
I’ve been pondering these experiences of my youth lately because of a horrifying thought I had the other day while walking across campus: the freshmen beside me were born in 1990! While LA was burning, they were toddling around oblivious. Bill Clinton is a blip on their memory, the background to elementary school. Bosnia, Oklahoma City, and Rwanda are as distant to them as Iran Contra, Nicaragua, and the Berlin Wall are to me. While I was watching in horror as news of Columbine unfolded on the TVs in the basement of the BYU bookstore, they were probably happily playing during fourth-grade recess. Events that have formed a key part of my journey from childhood absorption to adult awareness are completely unknown to them.

And yet, they have their own formative events seen from their own perspective. I think of my perplexity as my mom tries to explain to me the church before the 1978 revelation on the priesthood and realize that every generation has its cultural touchstones. I’m really not all that old, but sometimes I feel like it. I think I’m in a weird in-between stage—aware of how far I’ve come, yet simultaneously aware of how far I have to go. I know that in ten years I’ll look back on this moment and laugh at how “old” I felt at age thirty. But I also know that in ten years perspective will change again. It’s so hard to remember the past, and so easy to forget about it or to misremember it as new events find their way into the fabric of popular history. Part of why I write, both on my blog and in my journal, is to attempt to fix my perspective and my feelings at a particular moment in time. So when my grandchildren ask me what it was like when Obama became president I will hopefully have something to tell them.


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