Yesterday was my birthday, and as usual, toddled off to a neighbour’s place for an afternoon wine-session. All good, and I mentioned the only way I remember my birthday nowadays is that it falls on Hiroshima Day. Makes life easier for me
But I got puzzled looks from the ladies. I reiterated HIROSHIMA DAY. They had no idea what I was talking about. I said it was the nuclear bombing of Japan, both Hiroshima and 3 days later in Nagasaki that finally ended the Pacific War and forced Japan into surrender. Their eyes glazed over. They had never heard of such a thing.
I was flummoxed to be honest. Sure, there’s lots of history I have no idea about, but the BIG things you really can’t escape are, well, inescapable. Like Hiroshima.
A cousin of mine has a friend (found in the last few years) around the same age as us. She is always telling me about how carefully she has to explain everything to that friend. One story is where they visited the Crime Museum that exhibits the white Bronco from the OJ Simpson chase. The friend hadn’t the slightest clue who Simpson was, let alone about the chase. It is fairly mind-blowing to me how someone currently in their mid-50s who always lived in the US and was not someone who avoided TV could manage to have never heard of the OJ Simpson trial.
I was talking to a coworker (who works in another state) about the last “No Kings” protest we went to at the state capitol. He was asking about the turnout and I said it was the largest crowd I’d seen at the three protests we’d been to. Then I added “And it was in Topeka, so of course the Phelpses were there protesting too.” He had no idea what I was talking about. They’re not nearly as prominent these days as they were 10 or 20 years ago, but I thought pretty much everyone knew about Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.
(Of course the Phelpses weren’t protesting Trump, they were set up across the street from the capitol doing their usual schtick.)
My wife’s aunt by marriage watched the movie in which Tom Hanks played Sulky, the pilot that landed in the Hudson. She had no idea it was a real event.
I had a student ask me once about nuclear weapons, because she needed to know about them for an upcoming Model UN presentation. IIRC, her question was “Are all modern military weapons nuclear weapons?”.
I sure know what Hiroshima Day means / represents. I know it was in the late summer of 1945. Off top of my head I sure don’t have any idea which date in which month. After some thought, the war ended in early August and from Hiroshima to Nagasaki was 3 days and from Nagasaki to surrender was a few more. So late July or early Aug.
Conversely, I do know my birthday which doesn’t correspond to anything major in history that I know of.
Waaaaay back when I was still working, I was driving a coworker to DC for a meeting, and part of our route was across the 14th Street bridge. I mentioned how I was on the far end of that bridge when Air Florida Flight 90 hit it. He had no idea what I was talking about. Granted it had happened before he was born and it wasn’t exactly an earth-shaking event, but it threw me that he had absolutely no idea. Then again, I expect there were probably things in his life that were huge to him that I have no clue about. And in the grand scheme of things, the Air Florida crash, while providing some dramatic TV footage of one particular rescue, was just a local flight disaster, not a turning point in history.
I am fascinated by serial killers, and I’d watched Helter Skelter when I was 12 doing who knows what to my brain, but if you had asked me about Ted Bundy in the 70s I would have been “who”?
I was surprised to learn the Night Stalker killer was active in LA exactly when I lived there, and I had no idea.
Nut I knew who Ed Gein was. He’d only lived a about 20 miles away, though, and was alive in prison about 40 miles away when I was a kid.
Back in 2019, I had this happen. The other person in the exchange was 20 years old at the time, but still, jeez.
On July 2nd, I was in the hair salon, and the stylist asked about my plans for the 4th. I told her, and added that I hoped the hostess would not put the D.C. celebration on the TV like she’d done the last time I’d been at her house for the 4th. “I don’t need to see the Beach Boys perform, or I should say embarrass themselves, at the National Mall again. Mike Love’s voice is shot; can he really not hear himself?”
Her: “…Who are the Beach Boys?”
Me: “[thumbnail explanation] I guess someone thinks they’re the Quintessential American Band. I’unno; who would you say is the ultimate American band? The Eagles, maybe? Van Halen? Creedence?”
They hadn’t heard of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, or they hadn’t heard of the concept of “Hiroshima Day”? Because until this thread, I don’t think I’d heard of the latter either.
To bring this back around to the second post in this thread: OJ killed his wife on my birthday. I highly suspect that no one knows that date off the top of their head, though.
Hiroshima, the Holocaust, man lands on the moon, 9/11/2001 attack these are events I’d expect anyone alive to know about, OJ or the Phelps clan? Nah. Jeffery Dahmer maybe. Even big airplane crashes eventually recede in memory.
I might have given you silence, also; not because I haven’t heard of the bands listed (I have) but because trying to pick one and only one “ultimate American band” strikes me as impossible; at least for me.
– I have long since concluded that there’s nothing at all that everybody knows about. Probably about the time, maybe 30 years ago now, that I was faced with a farm intern who had no idea there’s such a thing as a plant that’s toxic to humans.
I’ll grant that there are things (including the Hiroshima bombing and the Holocaust) that I think everybody over, say, the age of 12 who’s living in this society ought to know about. But I recognize both that some people won’t, and that everybody will have a different list of ‘what everyone should know’.
