remember when the world was different?

Remember Dallas?

In 1980, J.R. Ewing was shot. The episode ended, and the entire summer became a guessing game.

Who shot J.R.? Would he survive? Everybody seemed to have a theory.

That was television before the internet. We waited for the next episode. We talked about it at work, with friends and around the dinner table.

Communication was different too.

Growing up in Canada, our television choices were not the same as those in the United States. We had Canadian broadcasting, limited channels and a very different relationship with American news and entertainment.

Then, around 1990, I went to Mexico. A friend had an enormous satellite dish, and suddenly there were different stations, different programming and MTV.

It was a revelation.

But the 1980s were also a complicated time.

The Moral Majority was influencing American politics. Dire Straits released Money for Nothing. Gay people were fighting to come out and be accepted. AIDS was devastating communities while misinformation and discrimination spread.

Then came We Are the World and Live Aid, reminding us that music could bring people together around a humanitarian cause.

There were enormous cultural, political and technological changes happening all at once.

Today's kids have instant access to information, entertainment and people around the world.

But do they know what came before?

Do they know what it was like to wait all summer for a television mystery to be solved? To discover an entirely new television channel? To watch the world change without having a smartphone in your pocket?

We need to tell these stories.

Not because everything was better back then. It wasn't.

But because understanding how we got here matters.

You cannot understand the present without knowing something about the past.