JFK Jr, 2020, and the Mandela Effect

Talking about politics was always a turn-on for me. When the guy talking about politics was also the Sexiest Man Alive, the effect sent me into the stratosphere and I would stop at nothing to make the world a better place for every man, woman, child, and animal that existed on this planet.

   So when John F. Kennedy, Jr., and one of the sons of Mario Cuomo (was it Andrew?) decided back in the late 1980s to form a club that focused on the year 2020, the year Baby Boomers who were born in 1955 would reach their 65th birthdays, I wanted in. I wanted to join this 2020 Club more than anything else going on at that time.
   Innovative ideas would be hatched to assure that Social Security was beyond solvent; plans were to be drawn up ensuring that the Senior Citizens of that futuristic year of 2020 would have the highest quality health care, better than anything our 1980s brains could imagine as we pondered flying cars and teleportation. I wanted to be in on this from the very beginning. In the year 2020 I wanted to be able to say that I'd been a card-carrying member of the 2020 Club for more than three decades (though I never found a way to sign up). I thought of the 2020 Club many times over the years, and never more so than that dreadful weekend in July of 1999 when the plane carrying the son of a president, who published a glossy, celebrity-filled Washington magazine, went missing and I stayed awake glued to the tube night and day, hoping and praying that my future president was alive and everything was going to be okay. It wasn't.

But the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and her sister did not put an end to the 2020 Club.  Because apparently there was never such a thing as the 2020 Club. I can not find a SINGLE REFERENCE to an organization I had pinned my political dreams on when I was barely old enough to be able to vote. I have searched newspaper database after newspaper database; used every Google trick and every Google Book tool; searched university archives and the Internet Archives; used the "Look Inside!" feature at Amazon.com for clues in authoritative biographies of this lost leader. Nothing.

It seems there was no 2020 Club, at least not in the reality track on which I find myself at the dawn of 2020. And with just ten minutes until the clock strikes Midnight and the 2020s begin, my skepticism of the Mandela Effect is really being challenged. I never subscribed to the Mandela Effect because I could always answer the question, "When did Nelson Mandela die?" correctly without batting an eye. To Mandela Effect believers that is proof that I am not currently living in the same reality in which they exist. I merely assumed Mandela Effect believers were simply not big followers of current events and did not pay close attention to brand names and other insignificant details of the planet on which we live. They always explain this away by insisting that they and I are simultaneously living in alternate realities, an idea which amuses me but one to which until just now I have given absolutely no credence.

But with five minutes to go until the dawning of the 2020s -- I understand. There WAS a 2020 Club. JFK Jr. and Andrew Cuomo DID have big plans, they DID start an organization -- it just didn't happen in this reality. And what a shame that is.

But thank God it's 2020. Thank God those of us who survived actually did survive. And we'll make the 2020s okay no matter what reality we exist in... It's going to be better... Everything is going to be alright.