Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings

by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America

  In 1994 TV brought another dramatic trial into America’s living rooms. O. J. Simpson, a well-known former football player who was now a sports commentator, movie actor, and advertising pitchman, was accused of the brutal murder of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Five days after the killings Americans flocked to their TVs to watch as Simpson fled from the police in a low-speed chase on a Los Angeles freeway. Simpson, in the backseat of a white Ford Bronco, gripped a revolver in one hand and a cellular phone in the other, announcing that he would kill himself if he couldn’t see his mother.

  By the time Simpson surrendered to the police, Americans were hooked on this tragic story. At first the case seemed to focus the nation’s attention on the problem of domestic abuse. Simpson had been arrested before for hitting his wife, and she had once made a frightened 911 call when he had threatened her. But race soon became the dominant issue. Simpson was black, and his ex-wife and her friend were white. When it was discovered that one of the investigating officers had regularly used racist language, many African Americans became convinced that Simpson had been framed.

  The trial was broadcast live on television for eight months and nine days. White Americans tended to believe that Simpson was guilty of two murders, while black Americans tended to believe he was the victim of a racist frame-up. It seemed as though the whole country was watching when, on October 3, 1995, the jury pronounced the verdict of not guilty. You could almost hear the nation split in two as most black Americans cheered and most whites shook their heads in disgust.

  The dream of true integration, the kind that would fulfill America’s promise of equality and unity, seemed more remote than ever. Two weeks after the Simpson verdict, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan led the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Women and whites were excluded. By focusing only on black men, the march appeared to reject the ideal of integration that had inspired Martin Luther King Jr. when he led the famous March on Washington in 1963. The Million Man March did stress some positive values—respect for women, responsibility to families, and a condemnation of violence. Still, it seemed that King’s vision of a tolerant, integrated America was now a part of history.

  African American men around the nation, including T. Deon Warner, born in 1959, traveled to Washington for the Million Man March.

  There is a perception in America that black males are the lowest, dirtiest, most conniving criminal people on this earth. Even black people think that. I know. I’m black and I am male and I have to overcome that image every day of my life. I am an attorney at a Houston law firm. And I’m a pretty good lawyer. I work on the forty-third floor of this modern sixty-four-story building. It’s a class building, the kind of place where everybody wears suits every day. One day I was riding the elevator up to my floor when a white woman got on, and as soon as she saw me she started clutching her purse, as though to protect it from me. I thought, “This cannot be happening. Surely, I do not look as though I could ever be a threat to this woman or her purse.” But, for some reason, to her I did.

  So when they announced that there was going to be this Million Man March and that one of the goals of the march was to try to change the negative perception of the black male, I knew that I had to go. I didn’t care how I got there or what I had to give up to go. It would be worth it to start changing the perception of black males. They were also trying to make a general statement that there are a lot of black males who don’t go to prison, who are not beating their wives and girlfriends, and who are not out to rob everybody they see on the street.

  I flew up from Houston and met a friend of mine from Michigan, and we made it down to the march site by about 4:45 A.M. When we got to the grounds things were still pretty empty. And then I started seeing people coming out of the woodwork. I mean, they were coming from all directions. Just thousands and thousands of people. About an hour after I got there, there were people as far as I could see. I was surprised at how many men brought their sons with them. Young kids. I mean, they were ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. These men wanted their children to see this event, to be part of it.

  There were many speakers throughout the day. And they came from different parts of the community: various religions, various backgrounds. One of the speakers was a twelve-year-old kid. And he gave a speech about how proud he was that he had a black father and that he was there at the march. He said that he represented the sons and daughters of each of the black males that were there. And then he made a demand of the audience. He asked that each person who was at that march go home and, if need be, rearrange their life so that they become a more positive role model in the communities. That they become better husbands to their wives. And a better father to their children. And then he asked everybody at the closing of the speech, “Will you do that for me?” Here’s a twelve-year-old kid and in a very eloquent way he made a request that just seemed so simple and so basic and yet so compelling.

  Black males have been painted as a subculture in our society. So the point about black pride and black male redemption is that we need to change our image. I don’t think we need to change, necessarily, what we do. Because I think we do a pretty good job of being citizens in this community. I think we need to change the image of what people think we do. If we don’t take charge to create and mold the perception that we want people to have of us, nobody else will. People need to understand that black males come in all different shapes and sizes just like white males or any other people in America. And if you can’t generalize as to the other groups, the white males, the Asian males, et cetera, then you shouldn’t generalize as to black males.

  In the 1990s it seemed that much of the way life was conducted in the twentieth century was rapidly becoming “history.” Technology accelerated the pace of change, rocketing America toward the twenty-first century. Old rules and traditions were out of date, and new ones were not quite established. A revolution was taking place. The Industrial Revolution had brought in the machine age, which was coming to a close. The new revolution was ushering in the information age.

  Computers had been around since the 1940s. The very name shows what they were expected to do—to compute, to add numbers. For decades these enormous machines could be found only in government offices and the headquarters of large corporations. What made the information age and the computer revolution possible was miniaturization. With the development of the microchip, the personal computer—a computer so small it could sit on a desk—became possible.

  Almost overnight, computers changed play (video games), changed research (access to databases), and changed writing and editing (word processors). Computers even began to change work itself. With a modem, people could communicate through their office networks without leaving home. A scientist sitting in her pajamas in Minneapolis could argue with a colleague in Mozambique. More and more, the question about the computer wasn’t “What can it do?” but “What can’t it do?” Every day, it seemed, there was something new that this electronic wizard could do better or faster or more efficiently than people could.

  By 1995 the computer was beginning to take people into the realm of science fiction—into cyberspace via the Internet. Originally developed by the Pentagon as a communications network that could withstand an atomic attack, the Internet was slow to catch on. But when it moved into mainstream American life, it swept in like a tidal wave. The most popular way to access the Internet was through the World Wide Web. Now people could find information, go shopping, or send electronic mail to the far corners of the world—all at the touch of a key.

  Cyberspace pioneers ventured boldly into the virtual world online. Stacy Horn, born in 1956, was one of them.

  When I was in my first semester at NYU, we had to call a place called the Well, and I was an instant addict. The Well is an online service based in California. It’s a virtual community, where people get online to pretty much talk about anything under the sun. When I was in my last year of graduate school, I logged into the Well and someone said to me, �
�Hey, we heard that you were going to start the East Coast version of the Well.” I had never said that, but all of a sudden it was like, “Duh, of course I can do that.” So I just typed in, “Yes, I am.”

  In March 1990 Echo opened to the public. I came up with the name Echo because I had some vague idea like you throw your words out into the world and words come back. I couldn’t get any investors interested because in 1989 nobody would believe me that the Internet was going to be hot.

  I structured Echo so it was made up of different areas—we call them conferences. There’s a books conference, a movies conference, an art conference, a New York conference, and within these conferences are conversations that fit under that general heading. The conversations are in what’s called non-real time. So I can go into, say, the books conference and type in whatever I have to say. Then you can log in tomorrow, see what I’ve written, and add whatever you want to say about the subject. So the conversation keeps going on, and you can talk to these people regardless of who’s logged in when. It’s actually better than a live conversation. In a conversation that’s non-real time, you can take your time and really consider your thoughts and say something more substantial.

  On the Internet, you get to know someone from the inside out first, whereas in the physical world it’s from the outside in. Each way has its pluses and minuses. People are people, and they’re no different online than they are anywhere else. We don’t sit down at our computers and all of a sudden become unreal. If I say “I love you” to someone on the phone, does that make it not real? So if I say it on a computer, why would that make it not real?

  The Internet played a big part in making the world seem smaller. People could now communicate with each other around the world, instantly, without laws or controls or many government restrictions. Many believed that the computer and the fax machine were vital to the collapse of Communism. A system that depended on controlling information simply could not withstand the new technologies. All people needed for ideas and information to flow was a computer and a phone line.

  Still, while enthusiasm for the World Wide Web raced around the globe, there was also skepticism. Some intellectuals worried about its impact on society. With technology dominating our lives, would we become slaves to the machines? Would the creation of so many virtual worlds make people care less about the real world?

  Mistrust of technology inspired the “Unabomber.” Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated hermit, had systematically targeted people in the technology industry. His mail bombs killed three people and injured twenty-three in sixteen separate attacks. They were an insane attempt to slow the progress of science and technology.

  But Kaczynski’s bombs were not as deadly as the work of Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, collapsing its nine floors. For days rescue workers pawed through the wreckage looking for survivors as outrage and despair gripped the nation. In the end, 168 people were dead, including 19 children who were in the building’s day-care center.

  How could there be a terrorist bombing in the heartland of the country? At first wild racist rumors placed the blame on “Middle Eastern types.” But as federal agents began to investigate, a more disturbing theory arose. April 19 was a date well known to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies of the federal government. Two years previously on that date, the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, had ended in a deadly fire. The Branch Davidians were a religious cult whose members had stockpiled weapons and were resisting investigation by federal authorities into how their children were being treated. On April 19, 1993, a total of eighty-four people died when federal agents attacked the compound.

  For those on the political far right, Waco became a symbol of the tyranny of the federal government. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19 was an act of revenge carried out not by foreign terrorists, but by an American veteran of the Persian Gulf War.

  The approaching millennium seemed to focus attention on chaos, destruction, and death. Increasingly the evening news mentioned Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan physician known as “Dr. Death,” who assisted terminally ill people to commit suicide. For decades medical advances had focused on prolonging life even through terrible disease. Medicine seemed unwilling to let the dying die. But by the nineties the “right-to-die” movement was gaining momentum. Advocates of the “right to die” suggested that there were greater concerns for patients and their families than simply being kept alive by machines regardless of the quality of life. The “right to die” with peace and dignity was seen as a humane concern that medical technology was ignoring.

  Opponents of the “right to die” argued that doctors would soon be deciding who lived and who died, giving people a power that rightfully belonged to nature or to God. It was an argument that pitted the control of the individual against the power of fate, the quality of life against the sanctity of life. But while the controversy raged, real people still had to cope with agonizing decisions.

  Christina Walker Campi, born in 1951, struggled with the best way to care for her dying husband.

  In 1996 my husband, Tom, became sick with what we thought was bronchitis. After antibiotics failed, he went through a battery of tests: chest X rays, MRI, CAT scan, bone scan, liver biopsy, ultrasound. It was like Western medicine at its best and its worst. At the end of it all they diagnosed him with metastasized lung cancer. And what was worse was that it had spread to his trachea and his liver. The next day I got our oncologist [cancer specialist] alone. He said, “What do you want to know?” I said, “I want to know how long he has.” He said, “Six to nine months.” My knees buckled.

  For the next several months Tom went through round after round of chemotherapy and treatments, but his cancer continued to spread. The day that I decided to stop treatment on Tom, his most recent MRI showed that the cancer had moved to his brain. He had already started to show some neurological symptoms. He still knew who I was, but he was confused in his thinking. Tom was a brilliant guy who loved to talk, and to see him starting to get confused and losing control of himself was awful. He felt so humiliated. And he was in terrible pain. The cancer had also moved into his bones, which is the most painful cancer of all. I decided to ease his pain with morphine, knowing that this would hasten his death. I knew what I was doing. I was pretty clearheaded at that point. But I’m still tortured by the possibility that he could have had just a short amount of time more, a couple more days. I feel horrible that I was the one with sole control over this decision.

  After Tom and I signed the DNR [do not resuscitate] order, he was moved to a private room and he was put on a morphine drip. After he was on the morphine for a while, a friend of mine, who happened to be a doctor on staff at the hospital, came by and said, “You know, he’s not going to last more than a couple of hours right now.” And I started to cry, because his children were on their way in from California to say good-bye, and I was afraid he would die before they got there. My friend told me to have them turn the morphine pump off, and then he’d come out of it for a little while. He woke up the next morning, and he saw his kids, and he kissed them, he hugged them. He kind of squeezed my hand a little bit, and he went back to sleep. And that was it; he never woke up again. Luckily, because I had them decrease the dosage, he was able to hold on to see his kids. But I had no guidance, no help on this at all except that I happened to have this friend who’s on staff there. He would’ve died that night and not seen his kids had we not turned the morphine pump off.

  We had been helped by the doctors with all sorts of treatment, but their help pretty much stopped when the treatment stopped. These were good doctors, with whom my husband was very attached, but they were trained to prolong life, not to deal with the dying process. I was left with this enormous feeling of having been abandoned.

  This experience made me realize that birth and death are equally important, but we only pay attention to the birth end of it. Whenever you
read anything about death or dying, you inevitably read about Dr. Kevorkian and about physician-assisted suicide. That is just a red herring in the whole discussion of death and dying. It has little to do with ordinary illness and dying. Death is like our dirty little secret. We all come to this world, but we pretend we are all not going to go out of it.

  I think Americans especially are terrified of death. We’re a can-do population, so death seems like a terrible failure to us. We assign blame rather than see death for what it is, which is the way it’s going to end for all of us.

  When England’s Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997, the new communications technology spread the news across the globe instantly. Although she and Prince Charles were divorced and Diana never would have been queen, she was known everywhere, and her death caused an enormous outpouring of grief. On the day of her funeral, more than a million people lined the streets of London to watch the coffin pass by. Billions more watched on television. Why did so many people mourn her passing? Diana was beautiful and charming, and she had supported many charities. But her connection to people seemed to go deeper than her outward accomplishments. People felt more loyalty to her than to the royal family she had married into. She was the “people’s princess,” and the sad story of youth and beauty and promise so tragically cut short moved people around the world to tears.

  The funeral of Princess Diana could be seen as a bookend for the century, matching the grand funeral of England’s Queen Victoria in 1901, which marked the passing of the 1800s. Life has changed more in the hundred years since Queen Victoria’s death than it did in the thousand years that went before. And most of the changes the twentieth century brought were for the better. Think about this: The life expectancy of an American born in 1905 was only forty-nine years; by 1998 it was seventy-six years. Think, too, about the fact that in the late 1800s every other death was that of a baby. And remember how many people at the beginning of the century lived not only without electricity or telephones or TVs or computers, but also without the basic freedoms that democracy now gives them.