It’s 2004
That’s what the little girl said on the TV to some weary time travelers. “It’s 2004!” The big box in the living area one level down showed this to you. At the time digital cable was a common phrase, and you were fascinated with the box attached to the set and what it could do.
For technology this was an age of confusion. Things were moving ahead but nothing was settled. Circuit City was still around. They threw all kinds of stuff at you and it was hard to keep up. HDTV was just coming on to the scene, but so were EDTVs that had no reason to exist. There were projection sets, plasma screens, LCDs, and even flat widescreen CRT displays that work the same as the box in your living room. You saw USB flash drives for the first time back then. Their capacity was measured in megabytes. They were compared to the equivalent in floppy disks on the display.
It’s 2004. This was a trailer for the Disney Channel series Phil of the Future. This trailer must have been on TV in May or so. The series premiered on 2004–06–18 and lasted until 2006–08–19. Two seasons that felt like forever when you were young. 26 months that bridged the gap between who you are then and who you are now.
Later on in the car you would hear on the radio that Ronald Reagan had died. You don’t have much of an opinion on that. You just know a lot of people liked him. The family didn’t obsess over this. It was seen like the death of George H.W. Bush later on.
You did not watch his funeral on TV.
It was shrugged off. A lot of political events were back then. People seemed to have better things to worry about, especially in Cheyenne. Life seemed normal. People were going to school and work.
Your family went to Colorado on occasion. This is where most of the fun was. Estes Park, Fort Collins and Loveland is where you will have your fondest memories. You like this state. It will be on your list when you eventually make it to Minnesota to be closer to your relatives, if only by distance.
Back home there was Frontier Days. This rodeo took place in the last week of July. A glimpse of the old west you embraced. You would later find out that much of this culture was ahistorical.
The takeaway you would get from this was that apathy is something you can’t get back. It gave you a massive high, from the Toby Keith concert to the whip guy by the shops.
You also went to see native Americans dance. It seemed like an ordinary thing to watch. You wonder what happened to that event after 2016. If it was canceled, how and why? What did Governor Freudenthal think about it? Did he have any influence in keeping that going, and did his absence make it disappear?
2004 was an ordinary year. It was one of the happiest of your life. The Presidential election back then would be the last one in your entire life in which the Republican won the popular vote. You barely remember 2000 at this point. You slept through 2004 as well.
Things weren’t as political back then. People had opinions but most of them were on the back burner. Social networks were not yet coming to prominence. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter did not exist. If you wanted to know somebody’s opinion on current events, you had to ask somehow. There was no easy way to look it up. The broadband that impressed you? The first site you saw on that was nick.com.
The biggest concerns in 2004 was the war on terror. People were asking questions that they should have from the very beginning. What is the appropriate response to 9/11? How much surveillance is too much, and will it be used against us?
None of that really mattered to you. You liked the laptop in your kitchen. You went for bike rides with Dad. You played in Lions Park and went to the botanical gardens from time to time.
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Race relations seemed okay. Racism was seen as a big no-no around the country. Indeed, you had moved to Wyoming from Georgia. A racist America was something your parents’ generation took care of, something you will never have to deal with.
Around this year your parents ran into this black guy wearing a cowboy at at Chili’s. They had a lovely conversation. You liked this dude. He walked in and out of their life spontaneously. You only saw him this one time.
The Episcopal Church you went to was in favor of LGBT rights. Dad would reveal later on that this church was the place that made him drop most of his homophobia. Indeed, Wyoming would be the very state you find out what being gay is and it didn’t seem like a foreign concept. Why not?
Despite this, you loved God and went hunting. You did calls while your Dad and his friend shot geese. It was fun back then. The geese deserved it.
Guns weren’t seen as political. They were something you went hunting with. That was it. The shotgun was not seen as a tool to defend the home by anyone in it. Stand your ground was not a thing. The castle doctrine probably was, but who does crime in Cheyenne? The refinery? Taco John’s and their crimes against the stomach?
Things in Cheyenne don’t have the reputation they have today. Taco John’s had almost no respect and the food wasn’t very good. Frontier Days was a hoot that anyone could be involved with. It was wild. It was the West.
Later on you would be forced out of this bubble and into reality. In 2005 you saw a JibJab cartoon mocking President Bush and the events at the time. The price of gas was going up. Jobs were being offshored. Free trade would continue to have a devastating impact on manufacturing and wages overall.
Then Dad lost his job because of a racist joke.
You moved to more states later on. The pieces began to fit together. You started reading the news, looking at Wikipedia, and finding out that America has more problems than you got to see in Wyoming.
2005 and every year that followed canceled 2004. Everything you knew became dust in the wind. You found out about climate change, economic inequality, and de facto discrimination. The opinion on gay marriage was changing and that was making a shrinking share of the population ever more upset.
Apparently there is no limit to how angry you can make people over sharing their country with people who are different.
Phil of the future ended in 2006, when you made a head-on collision into real America. This will end up being one of the most influential years of your life. This is the model year of the car you drive in 2021. It was the year the Republican party went on defense in politics and culture. They continue to be second banana. Number two in our political duopoly.
Technology went from not knowing what to buy to not knowing how to use it. You continually have to fix an issue your mother has. She is feeble with her devices and difficult to teach. She has yet to understand how a password manager works, so changes are frequent. When you move out you’re going to wonder how many times she is going to call you over a technology issue. Your brother is the golden child so he is not going to be bothered over trivial things.
The technology you saw in Phil of the Future is about a century early. Phone (i.e. “the Wizard”), laptop and TV are the standard trinity. They have accessories, but they are the things you keep years at a time. At this point you’ve mastered navigation, playing media, and are even learning to create it.
You have more things to say than ever before because many don’t know what is real. They got lost in Internet rabbit holes. They need constant reminders of who is in charge, what issues we face and where we go from here. They need to know the things they did in 2004. They also must know that things have gotten much worse since then.
15 years have passed. It’s not 2004, it’s 2021. The pandemic may be over, but the fight to save America continues. It is more pressing than ever, and you will do anything to protect it from its enemies within.
