Tied Up

[Darkprincess69]

I find that as I get older, I judge the ages of my fellow humans by the first major event they remember. For example, about two decades ago, I was working at a company, and I was telling a coworker about how one of my college professors talked about the Challenger disaster. He said, "I was three." My response, "Screw you, kid!" ;-)

I think most of us tend to remember important (or at least newsworthy) events. I remember the moonlanding (although vaguely because I was so young), and other events during the space programme such as the Apollo/Soyuz linkup, Skylab, the first Shuttle launch, then of course Challenger (and Columbia). This stuff has always interested in me as my dad was a pilot and so aerospace stuff was always being talked about as I was growing up, and then I remember stuff like when Elvis died, When John Lennon was shot, Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall coming down, and so on. And now of course we are referring to events as being pre-covid or post-covid.

I guess that we always find it convenient to place these markers during our lives to help us organise disparate events

 

[Loinclothslave]

Same here, even though I was only 4 years old at the time. Here in the UK it happened in the early hours of the morning but my dad woke me up and put me in front of the tv. I didn't really understand it at the time but I remember him telling me that it was important and that it's something I'd remember all my life. That doesn't mean much when you're four, but it resonates powerfully today...

Mum told me she sat me in front of our telly for the moon landing but I wasn’t even a year old. She told the story often enough while I was growing up that I thought I remembered but of course the famous shots were so often repeated it was the repeated footage I actually recall.

So basically I have never been contemporaneously aware of a world when man/humans had not landed on the moon….

 

[Loinclothslave]

My first major event was 9/11

My first major event I definitely remember was Cyclone Tracy which devestated Darwin in 1974, soon followed by the final fall of Saigon the following year along with the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam also in 1975. “Long May you say ‘God Save the King’… because nothing will save the Governor General” - poor Gough was a victim of his own success and a hostile world economy… plus Liberal party trickery (imagine a Senator dying and being replaced by a new appointee from the opposing party- who then use their new majority to block supply!) We still benefit from a tonne of the reforms he introduced… But there was definitely huge problems with inflation getting out of control, albeit as is typical, it got worse under the Liberals…