The World Has Changed. Boy, Has It Changed.

[Geee]

Commentary Magazine:

When you watch politics carefully and you have attained a certain age, you often misunderstand it—because you forget how many, many people are far younger than you and do not share the same memories. Some of us who live in New York City spent much of the last mayoral election warning about the consequences of turning back the clock on policing to the days before Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 election—but of course that meant nothing to the 50 percent of the electorate who had no idea what it was like in the city in those years. Now consider the fact that 18 year-olds who will vote for the first time in 2016 were three years old on 9/11 and 10 when Barack Obama was elected, and you have a sense of how the traditional conversation about foreign policy, for example, may make little or no sense of them.

 

I’ve been struck this morning by two signs of the colossal changes in the world and in the United States since I was in my mid-20s—one significant and one not so significant but telling nonetheless.