Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (10 page)
Read Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Online
Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
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 valuesârespect 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.
T
here 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 doâto 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 computerâa computer so small it could sit on a deskâbecame 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 fictionâinto 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 worldâall at the touch of a key.
Cyberspace pioneers ventured boldly into the virtual world online. Stacy Horn, born in 1956, was one of them.
W
hen 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 areasâwe 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.