Key Events during my Lifetime

Key events in my lifetime
1947 - 1991 Cold War. School drills for ducking under desks in case of a nuclear attack.
1964 Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
1963-1968 Assassinations - President Kennedy (1963), 
     Martin Luther King, Jr (1968), Senator  Robert F. Kennedy (1968)
1969 Landing a man on the moon  
1989 The fall of the Berlin Wall &  breakup of the Soviet Union 1889 and early 1990s
1964 The Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s - 47,434 american soldiers killed
1965 - Bell 103 (110 baud) modem for remote access to computing over phone lines
1970's The Watergate scandal involving Richard Nixon in the	
1978 - Atari first popular home computer, See Personal Computers
1991 The Persian Gulf War in 1991 (Iraq attacks Kuwait)	
1991 - World Wide Web (WWW) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) introduced by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
    See Internet Timeline
1992 - First SMS (Short Message Service) message (text message) sent by Neil Papworth in the UK to a Vodafone
  AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) becomes popular in the late 1990's
  2006 Twitter introduced
1995 - Amazon online bookseller started
1992 - Mosaic Web Browser Marc Andreessen at NCSA
1998 - Blackberry handheld computer and phone
     2007 - iPhone
1998 - Google search engine introduced
2001 9/11 Sept 11th 2001 Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center,
    and pentagon 2,977 killed
2003 - Myspace social networking service introduced
  2004 Facebook Started
2003-2010 - War in Iraq 4,431 americans killed
2001-2021 - War in Afganistan 2,445
2005 Hurricane Katrina 1,800 died
2010 Barrack Obama elected President

2012 - Hurricane Sandy killed 233 people across eight countries from the Caribbean to Canada.
I was without power for 12 days in Martinsville NJ
2015 - The Supreme Court Declares Same-Sex Marriage Legal In All 50 States.
Before the ruling, gay marriage had already been made legal in 37 states.
I got involved the issue with my church where I had been a member for 30 years when I joined a group supporting the governing body's decision to support same-sex marriage.
2014 - General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church USA, the largest Presbyterian denomination, voted to approve same-sex marriage (at the discretion of individual churches)
2007 The First Presbyterian Church of Roseville, the church I grew up in, which was established my Great Grandparents left PC USA to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in anticipation of the above vote.
2015 Disaffiliation of Liberty Corner Church, (where I was a 30 year member) from PC USA to join the A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO), Presbyterian Church in America .
2016 Donald Trump Elected President
2017-2021 - Removal of Confederate War Monuments and Memorials in the South gains attention.
The movement started in the 1960's by the belief that the monuments glorify white supremacy; memorialize an unrecognized, treasonous government, the Confederacy whose founding principle was the perpetuation and expansion of slavery
On Aug. 12, 2017, a Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville VA when neo-Nazis clashed with counter protestors and one woman was killed prompted more attention on the effort to remove the statues and monuments. The Charlottesville statues were finally removed in July 2021 along with many others in 2020 and 2021.
2020 - The murder of George Floyd on May 25th 2020 by a police officer after he was being arrested on suspicion that he may have used a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis changed the conversation around Black Lives Matter (BLM).
From 2015 to January 2021, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide.
2020 - California fires
3 of the 4 largest fires in California History occurred in 2020. 31 fatalities, and over 10,488 structures were damaged or destroyed.
Over 4 million acres, an area the size of the state of Connecticut, burned.
On September 14th Air quality Index (AQI) hit 503 near the California Oregon border. Anything over 300 is considered hazardous by the EPA and their scale doesn't go above 500.
The whole central valley had an AQI above 400.
The 2018 Camp fire in Paradise and neighboring communities was the deadliest with 86 deaths.
2020-2021 COVID-19 Pandemic - Marginalized groups have taken the brunt of the physical and financial damage that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused in the United States.
2021 Capital Insurrection