Elizabeth's Day Off

[Elizabeth Braddock] Two World Wars have left Europe and Japan scarred; the Holocaust saw millions of Jews systematically murdered; atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Chernobyl became a symbol of nuclear catastrophe; and for four decades, the Cold War held the world beneath the shadow of annihilation. Now the Soviet Union is gone, the Iron Curtain has fallen. War continues to tear apart the former Yugoslavia, while in Rwanda a fragile peace collapses into one of the worst genocides of the modern era, and yet there is hope.

It is 1996. The millennium is fast approaching, and after nearly a century of catastrophe, the world dares to believe that the worst may finally be behind it. From Washington to Moscow, from Berlin to Tokyo, there is a growing sense that history may finally be turning a corner. The nuclear standoff has ended. Old borders are opening. Nations once divided by an iron curtain are speaking of cooperation. After a century of war and fear, humanity looks toward the approaching millennium and allows itself, cautiously, to dream of peace.

Nowhere is that optimism more evident than in the United States. The Cold War is over, the economy is recovering, and the country is looking toward a future defined by technology, commerce, and connection. Personal computers are beginning to find their way into American homes, cellular phones are becoming increasingly commonplace, and the Internet is slowly escaping the universities and laboratories that first built it. The White House itself has gone online. To many Americans, the future no longer looks like something to fear. It looks like something to buy, watch, build, and discover.