A L O O K B A C K AT 2 0 0 1
HOPE OR ILLUSION? BY JOE WRIGHT (18–)
When I asked my Mum what she remembers about 2001, she said ‘Optimism’. So I shall start there.
A
t the start of 2001, there were several good reasons to be hopeful. The news at the beginning of the year told us that scientific innovations showed we were learning more about ourselves than ever before. In February of 2001 the first draft of the complete human genome was published, and in July the first AbioCor self-contained artificial heart was implanted. These two landmarks are often overlooked but they signify a huge leap in how science could be used to affect people’s lives: we now had the tools to create the organ of life itself, shattering the age-old assumption that death was unbeatable.
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Anyone you ask will tell you that they know exactly where they were, and what they were doing, on the 11th of September 2001. One year and nine months after the turn of the millennium filled the world with hope, Mum was teaching in school all day, isolated from the news. However she knew from hushed whispers of colleagues that something terrible had happened. That evening she drove up to London where she met my father and grandfather for dinner, and my parents announced their engagement. She remembers that journey as the radio drilled out the incomprehensible story, and sobbing all the way to the restaurant, where the happy news of a new life beginning was drowned by the hundreds who had had theirs cut short. After 11 September 2001, there were another four major disasters involving planes in the subsequent months of that year. Is there any explanation for how, in just a few months, disasters on airplanes
(accidental or engineered) could snatch so many lives from the world? Sometimes the human mind has to find a reason for things that seem too terrible to explain, and so, for want of a better cliché, maybe the year 2001 was when the soaring hopes of the new millennium plummeted tragically back to earth. Aside from the tragedies that shattered the general feeling at the latter end of the year, 2001 was littered with smaller incidences that seemed to feed the growing sense that post-millennium optimism was a sham. The Millennium Dome was the perfect focal point for such sentiment. Although Tony Blair’s New Labour comfortably won the 2001 general election, the sunny optimism which powered them to the 1997 landslide was starting to wane, and the public saw the Dome as an embodiment of how empty such wild hopes were. By 2001, Blair’s great monument appeared a purposeless homage to the age of ‘Cool Britannia’ which was already showing cracks.
