Entering its third decade since the attacks, sports remains a visual extension of 9/11 - 20 years of sports viscerally shaped by geopolitics. The vocabulary of his generation is shaped by that day, definitions of the combatants on either side of the front line: Heroes. Born three years after the attacks, he has never lived in an America not at war. The father a child of Pearl Harbor, the son of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the grandson of the twin towers' destruction. The 9/11 generation is my son's generation. This month, the NFL resumed, and the chaos and reckoning of 2020 collided with the 19th anniversary of the Sept.
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In the early 1970s, I remember being terrified by those yellow-and-black signs in the foyers and stairwells of so many public and professional buildings - a rectangular sign, three inverted triangles within a circle, and two ominous words: Fallout Shelter. The Soviets, the Americans, "The Day After," the world ending. My generation was defined by the Cold War and all of its fears of Manchurian candidates and nuclear Armageddon. His nationalism and racism finally relented around 1990, when he pulled into the driveway in a Mazda, but his stance was not uncommon the fidelity to avenging Dec. He lived unbothered by the inconsistencies of owning at various points of his life a Japanese motorcycle (Yamaha) and television (Hitachi), yet for decades loudly refusing to take what he considered to be the traitorous step of purchasing a Japanese car - despite having over the years owned both a Volkswagen Beetle and a Jetta. My father was born in 1938 the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor three years later was the defining moment of his generation. Within this calamity, the presumptions of our exceptionalism provided no shield indeed, we have shown ourselves to be utterly unexceptional, and the gap between who we are and our vision of ourselves is cavernous. In the mayhem, sports discovered early that its preferred profit-making role as "healer" has been replaced by the profit-threatening role of "barometer" as the twin colossi of pandemic and unrest redefine society and the industry, one bubble, one walkout, one referendum on amateurism at a time. The National Guard stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial - the nation's most powerful reminder that crossing the brink is possible because it has been crossed before - and ominously prepared to act against its own citizens. As a global pandemic is treated as a political issue instead of a public health one, the impatience to return to normal and urgency to protest for a new normal delays the arrival of either.Ī dystopian summer saw the streets filled with anti-racism protesters, anti-mask protesters, combat-ready police and, more frighteningly, unidentified, unaffiliated "law enforcement troops" believed to be prison guards deployed by the president to police American streets. The nation, in short, has come apart, in words and images, deadly actions and even deadlier inaction.
The American reckoning, or at the very least the burgeoning outline of one, has come into focus, forced into view by a perfect storm of toxicity: a global pandemic claiming more than 205,000 lives in the United States alone the ongoing use of police force against Black citizens that further undermines any notions of peace or change a corporate class long indifferent to Black suffering suddenly aligning its brands with protest fears of an illegitimate election further exposing the fragility of bonds generations of Americans think unbreakable - even as the house continues to prove it cannot stand. Police, protest, pandemic and the end of the 9/11 era
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If you like Lloyd Banks and the old G-Unit Mixtapes from the late 90's early 2000's you will def like these.You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser