" . . . and get off my lawn!"

So there I was last night, standing at the grocery store checkout, when something awkward happened: the cashier started bagging my groceries. I had already put a few items into my cloth bags (gotta get the PC points, baby - and oh yeah, the environment) when she reached out and stuffed some boxes of pasta into a bag. I felt suddenly very awkward, that someone should be doing my work for me.

That's when it struck me, how much times have changed. A few years ago, you never bagged your own groceries. Hell, you never even brought your own bags. You just made your choice when the bag boy asked "paper or plastic?" and that was that. Now I'm not saying that it isn't a good thing that grocery stores have started giving incentives for bringing in reusable bags, or even that it's a bad thing to pack one's own groceries. I actually don't mind bagging my purchases, if only because I usually do a better job than the careless kids ever did. But still - how times have changed.

Perhaps, though, I am reading too much into too little, overreacting to an insignificant event. Maybe it is simply a side effect of the changing seasons, this hypersensitivity to change. Still, I suspect I am not alone. In the past few weeks, between the Canadian election and the death of Osama bin Laden, the fact that it has been nearly ten years since 9/11 has been at the forefront of the public consciousness.

There are already more than enough political opinion blogs clogging the blogosphere, so I will refrain from adding water to the ocean. I will say, though, that looking back on the past ten years, it's hard to feel terribly optimistic. It has been a decade of pain, conflict, disaster and devastation, and things don't look to be getting much better.

That said, it is possible to find some (gallows) humour in the whole mess. Shortly after the news of Osama bin Laden's death broke, a friend of mine posted this clip from Robin Williams' post-9/11 Broadway stand-up show:

Should we laugh? Perhaps not. But I did. And I also fell victim to a fit of what the Greeks call "asbestos gelos" ("unquenchable laughter") as I watched the rest of the ninety-minute show. There was a certain prescience to Williams' monologue; even though the show took place in the summer of 2002, his jokes about the news of the day are only more bitterly amusing nine years on. But while most of his jabs at politicians and celebrities rang true, one did not. As Williams joked about the athletic prowess of a certain Tiger Woods, it was only possible to laugh ironically, considering the golfer's recent fall from grace. I was reminded of how many publications chose Tiger as their person of the year in 2009, and it struck me that perhaps he would make a better "person of the decade." After all, the real tragedy of the past ten years is not that we let our leaders - political, corporate, and otherwise - lead us into the jaws of hell. It's that we trusted them.

It's inevitable that society changes, and no matter how many times I joke about becoming a bitter old man, there's little we can do to stop it. Still, we can laugh through the pain. And we can make sure that we ourselves don't succumb to the same change.