The Great Divide

From a historical and political perspective, I suppose the "great divide" in my lifetime was the Suez Crisis, although I was too young at the time to grasp its significance. After Suez, there could no longer be any pretence that we (the British) were a great power.

Technically speaking, we can distinguish between the world before and after the digital revolution.

There is a case, too, for seeing, September 11 as a great watershed in our lives, separating a time of innocence from an age of terror.

But I wonder whether the greatest change of all has not been the truly dreadful AIDS epidemic. I am not writing here about the terrible toll exacted by this scourge that is still with us today, but about its social ramifications. It takes an effort of the imagination to think ourselves back to a time before the war when Stanley Holloway could intone "my word, you do look queer" in total innocence, or, much more recently,when Gilbert O'Sullivan could sing "To think that only yesterday, I was cheerful, bright and gay" when "gay" still had its original meaning. It seems to me that, before the 80s we as a society were in a state of denial, rendering life miserable without our fully realising it for millions of people.

There is much not to like about our modern society - our obsession with material things, our with celebrities celebrities - but the world we have left behind, with its taboos and casual racism, was not all that wonderful either.