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Some people will remember 1991 as the year that General Motors, IBM, Magic Johnson's career and the Soviet Union all came apart while Saddam Hussein remained in power. Millions of others will remember it as the year they fell out of the middle class.
However, last year produced evidence that America is becoming a kinder, gentler nation.
About 25 years ago, the supermarket tabloids carried lurid headlines about college students in Pennsylvania who had supposedly eaten LSD, which so addled them that they stared at the sun and went blind.
Even though that never happened, the government hastened to outlaw LSD so that the public could be protected from staring at the sun and going blind.
At least five people recently damaged their eyesight permanently by gazing at the sun while at the Mother Cabrini Shrine. But in the kinder, gentler America of 1991, nobody proposed to outlaw the shrine as a threat to the public health. No cop arrested the woman whose announcements inspired thousands to join her in staring at the sky.
That's surprising, considering the trend of the times. In general, Americans demand governmental protection against every imaginable menace -- perfume, tobacco smoke, diseased sexual partners, impure urine, double entrendes.
Given that there was absolutely no public reaction to this epidemic of blindness, then the sighting may have been a miracle. It wasn't the only possibility in 1991.
Last month I got paid $50 for a short magazine piece that I was supposed to get $125 for. I inquired of the editor. Within a week (a phenomenon in itself, given the glacial speed at which publications usually pay), I had a check for the full $125.
What about the extra $50? Just keep it,
the
editor said. We fouled up.
That evening, I ran into another free-lancer. She, too,
had been overpaid for something. In all the years I've
been writing, this has never happened,
she said.
Same for me,
I agreed. It's always worked the
other way before.
It's a miracle,
she said. Getting overpaid for an
article is a violation of the known laws of the universe,
so it probably should be considered a miracle.
But I'm not quite a believer yet. I would be if I were notified of a decrease in premiums for health or auto insurance, or of a pay raise from a prominent metropolitan newspaper. It wouldn't even take that much. I'd call it a miracle if our dog ever passed a trash can without tipping it over and cheerfully spreading garbage to the four winds, or if I ever bought some computer software that actually worked the way the documentation said it worked.
Then there would be incontrovertible evidence that the rules of the universe had been violated. But I'm not going to spend 1992 holding my breath.
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