It's kind of scary (to me, at least) that 31 years ago was 1970, but 1939 was just 31 years before that...
I have no idea what it's like for other people, especially people older or younger than I am (27), but to me decades go something like this:
'00s: Livin' it right now, though it still doesn't feel like a new decade, well, it's just starting to, but not a new century or millenium. I've no idea how those should feel, though I bet hovercars would soften the blow.
'90s: Went by so fast. I keep thinking things that actually happened in the early '90s happened in the late '80s, especially movies and political movements. A good litmus test is where I was living. I moved to Berkeley and started college in '91, so I don't think of it so much as the '90s as the 'Berkeley decade'.
'80s: The heyday. This is my archetypical decade. It felt like it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn't seem that long ago, though it frightens me when I realize some friends of mine and people in my classes didn't even exist at the beginning of this decade, and even worse, they can already buy cigarettes and alcohol...
'70s: Something to laugh at. It seems real, I lived through most of it, though I wasn't really aware of it as a place in time, not realizing how much things would change, or how much they'd changed in teh 10 years previous. Nixon? Never knew the guy but he probably was a crook, victory-fingers and wobbly jowels or no.
'60s: They seem a little real to me, mostly because I've seen pictures of a slightly younger version my mom with long black hair, and I can match that to all the things I hear and read about the 60s. Of course, living in Berkeley I'm barraged with the anti-war, free-speech, hippy tie-dye picture of the 60s all the time, perpetuated not only by the t-shirt street vendors and Peoples Park, but by the annual batallion of new students who chose Berkeley because they were activists in high school, and see the school as the mother ship calling them home. The irony is that Berkeley in the 60s was a much more conservative campus than it is now, and it was a media lens on a relative few, and those who joined them from outside the campus, which built the picture of Berkeley as a hotbed for activism, a picture that has consequently come true after the fact.
'50s: This is where things start moving into fantasy for me. Most of my impressions of the 50s are from Norman Rockwell paintings, episodes of Leave it to Beaver, Back to the Future, and themed restaurants like Johnny Rocket's and Mel's Diner. Flat greyscale tones and important-looking bald people in double-breasted suits.
'40s: Another media explosion, the '40s means World War II. A history lesson about who did what where, and how the nation came together to fight a common enemy in a just war. we were good, very good. They were evil, very evil. Though you were terrified, you were righteous because you knew your cause was just. My parents were born in the '40s about the same time I was born inthe '70s. I should probably ask them...
'30s: The Great Depression. No concept of what it was like. I mean, literally yes, but I don't know how it would feel to be thrust into a world where suddenly nearly everyone is poor, living through hardship so soon after such good times. Even with our own recent Nasdaq crash, I'm having trouble visualizing exactly how the transformation takes place. Probably because of the media I watch and read, it's far easier for me to imagine a post-cataclysmic US (ala Dark Angel) than it is to see one where everyone is poor, but things are intact, like some giant economic neutron bomb went off.
'20s: A cultural period, taking a breath from the changes in the preceeding decades, people are starting to be at ease with cars, airplanes, and the like, and just want to have fun. World War I is over, and swing dancing is in its heyday. I'm pretty sure someone from that time would read this and laugh, yet this is the image I come away with.
'00-'10s: Airplanes, cars, and World War I. It just seems so early for these people to have airplanes. I can't believe they've been around for nearly a century. When I think of what the world was like when Edison invented the light bulb, or Morse created the telegraph, airplanes, cars, computers, what have you, I'm usually amazed at the world they were invented in, and that that world could give rise to such an invention. It amazes me that people could go to the Moon in the '60s, after only 7 years of intense planning. If we had to go back to the Moon today, it would take at least 15 years and 10 times as much money. You don't have to look much further than the Internatioal Space Station to see that. We've built space stations before, yet now everything seems harder to do and far more expensive. Anyhow, the point of this misplaced soliloquy is that the inventions of today will almost no doubt be seen by future people as ahead of their time, and how could a society as primitive as ours possibly have given rise to (insert next big thing here). I feel like the Net was really a product of our time. Will our grandkids wonder how we could have done it when computers were so primitive? Will it be because the Net will have evolved into something so much more fantastic by that time (like biplanes to jet fighters), or because they'll see us as being more primitive than we actually are?
1800s: Pure history. the Civil War, slavery, manifest destiny and the gold rush are just historical accounts, and as much as I can visualize the places, people, and circumstance, I can't connect it to what I see around me now (unless I visit a cemetary, or other historical site). It's not even that far back, yet things change so much.
Well, as usual, much longer winded than I expected or intended. It's just weird to finally have a nicely wrapped package I can call a century. A century I participated in (well, for the last fourth, anyhow), yet one so completely different than the one before it. not to get all trite, but I really do wonder what the next century will hold... This entry is exactly the kind of thing that someone in 2101 will look up, read, and smile at.