O.J. Simpson and the Blessing of Being Generation X

The very definition of “a different time.”

Every generation has collective moments when time stops, when something so momentous happens that it’s obvious in the moment you’ll be able to recall every specific detail about it for the rest of your life. We all have these stories: Where we were, what we doing, how we reacted when the world went from being one way to suddenly, violently jolting into an entirely different place all together — a place from which we’ll never return. The Kennedy assassination is the canonical example for my parents’ generation; my mom always talks about how my grandmother was initially angry Walter Cronkite interrupted “As the World Turns,” her favorite soap opera. (Our family watched “As the World Turns” well into my adulthood; Holden and Lily, forever!) Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, the Bay of Pigs, these moments populate the entirety of American history.

I have five of these in my life. And two of them revolve around O.J. Simpson.

It is impossible to explain to someone who was not there just how all-encompassing the O.J. Simpson saga was.

In the wake of Simpson’s death this week from cancer, which I wrote about for New York, much has been made of the trial itself, for good reason; rarely has America’s insanity been portrayed in broad daylight as plainly as it was for those few months. But when I think back about the O.J. Simpson saga, I still hark back to the very beginning, when it became clear that Simpson was in fact a suspect in his ex-wife’s murder. The most shocking moment was the first one, the idea that O.J. Simpson, O.J. Simpson, could be a murderer. O.J.? That O.J.? The smiling guy on NBC? The guy from all the commercials? Nordberg? This guy?

I do not blame young people for reading back about all this and finding us all a…