The first quarter of the 21st century ends next week. Yes, we’ve gone through 25 years since the turn of the millennium.
I served on the Millennium Commission that was set up by Mayor Tom Menino to prepare Boston for the year 2000. It started with a meeting at Harvard Business School in 1997 that, oddly, was about the enormous economic impact on Massachusetts of MIT, with the keynote speaker being the CEO of Bank of Boston.
The commission had great ambitions and asked people to submit ideas for how Boston should evolve in the new millennium. Hundreds were submitted. But it seemed that there would be no money to accomplish any of them, so the chief mission became choosing a way to celebrate the Jan. 1 event— which included fireworks over the Boston Common.
The commission was also asked to pick a new cultural attraction for Fan Pier in the then-new South Boston Waterfront Innovation Zone. We ultimately voted for the Institute for Contemporary Art, although any record of the vote is apparently lost to history, as you can’t find any information about it online.
Just 20 months after the celebration, the US was attacked by terrorists, and that dramatically changed our world. Before 9/11, most buildings didn’t have much security. You could walk into the Capitol building in Washington and wander the hallways. There were no metal detectors to get into the State House or City Hall, and the quickest way to get from one to the other was to walk through the Pemberton Square Courthouse, now named for John Adams. There were information desks in some buildings, but you didn’t need to sign in or out or discuss where you wanted to go inside them. You could even walk up to the gate at airports to greet people coming off planes.
Osama Bin Laden’s “victory” was not the attack itself; it was the fact that he injected fear and suspicion into our cultural marrow. He changed every bit of America into one where security design became paramount. It has cost trillions of dollars to secure nearly every government and commercial building in the country, and there’s no going back on that.
The Covid-19 pandemic was the primary bookend to the first quarter of the century. Expanding the security precautions of 9/11, the pandemic prevented people from getting into hospitals to see loved ones, moved learning on line, kept people 10 feet from one another while wearing masks, and set meetings all-virtual. Many of the precautions have been eased, but Zooms are seemingly permanent.
We now “meet” by looking at boxes with people in them. While that is a major benefit in saving travel time, it has been a disaster for building relationships among the people in those boxes. Gone is the chit chat that establishes personal connections between members of boards or organizations that have meetings.
I’m on the state’s Board of Higher Education and I had meetings for a few years by Zoom before having an in-person retreat, which included precious time for informal conversation, dinner, and even a group sing along. I was happily surprised to learn that I had much in common with most other members of the board.
This first quarter went by very quickly with major impacts on the way we live. The days of in-person meetings and buildings without metal detectors seem quaint. The omnipresent security and impersonal nature at the end of the first quarter certainly have had an impact on the divisiveness that affects our country and needs to be re-examined.
How about more personal and less Zoom time, and more opportunities to bring people together to create stronger communities and relationships. It’s what we need as we head into the future. Open those songbooks!
Bill Walczak lives in Dorchester. His column appears regularly in The Reporter.
