A Short History Jay Jacobs

A Short History

By Jay Jacobs

When I was eight years old, we collected bugs and placed them in a jar. We poked holes in the cap so they could breathe, and gave them grass so they could climb and eat. It was the age of innocence. In 1963, I was eleven years of age. In November of that year on the twenty-second day, President Kennedy was shot and killed. It was the end of innocence. When the ‘70s came around and I was a young man of twenty, we marched, and protested, and loved freely and ingested mind-altering substances. It was the age of awareness. The eighties came and clinging to it were a few pages written during the previous decades. But the print had faded and the once-hard-edges of truth and reason that characterized those eras had softened and were ill-defined. It was an age of diminishing returns. While in my forties, the ‘90’s were the future come at last. But there were no flying cars, robot servants or tours of the moon. The bedrock precepts of institutional stability and the accuracy of historical events, once taken for granted, were questioned and challenged, and the Ten Commandments were removed from public buildings. It was the time of false gods. The second millennium brought my fifth and sixth decades along with a technological noise that blotted out clear thinking, long held traditions, and human interaction. It brought new ways of looking at things that flew in the face of reason. It brought wonders along with evil to pocket size handheld screens. It brought lies and gossip parading as news. It brought thieves, perverts and mass murderers on an unprecedented scale. It brought daily news of horrific depravities. It brought new terms like ‘mis-spoke’ and ‘political correctness’ and ‘new normal’. It brought maniacs to the highest offices. It was, and remains, the age of insanity.