Yes we did!

"Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right'cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonightand only time we chill is when we kill each otherit takes skill to be real, time to heal each otherAnd although it seems heaven sentWe ain't ready, to see a black President"

- TuPac Shakur circa 1996

Those words from the song "Changes" that was released posthumously two years after his death in September 1996 take on such vivid and now dated feeling. In our lives it seems as though the watershed historical moments which mold the times we live in are more often than not connected to tragic events like the death of Tupac Shakur. For me there was the suicide of Kurt Cobain on my twelfth birthday in 1994. The helicopter crash that killed Stevie Ray Vaughan in August 1990, which was the first and one of the only times I've ever seen my father cry. The Challenger shuttle explosion in 1986 that I watched with the rest of my pre-school class and luckily was still too young to fully understand the tragedy of it at the time. The death of Princess Diana in 1997. The Columbine Massacre on April 20, 1999. Voting for the first time ever in the 2000 Presidential election, which will undoubtedly go down as the most controversial of modern times. The horrific events of September 11, 2001 in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. The War in Iraq that began March 2003 and will end…well, we'll see about that. Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005.

Now not everything has been tragic though. Sometimes petty and disappointing, like watching President Clinton impeached but not removed from office for lying about oral sex with an intern. And knowing that the U.S. Congress spent millions of tax payer dollars trying to bring the President down with the investigation that lead to the discovery of said sex scandal.

There have been unforgettable and inspiring times like when I was over at my neighbor's, The Alexander family, as we watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down piece by piece and the cold come to an end.

There have been historical non-events like Y2K. While I've seen technology grow from floppy discs to flash drives. The once amazing 8-bit graphics of Atari and NES game systems are now replaced by the Sony Playstation 3 with its High-Def picture and interactive play. We have set a robotic foot on Mars and one of the earliest Voyagers satellites that had been launched ten years before I was born has now left our known solar system.

I watched with pride as Vince Young delivered a National Championship to the Texas Longhorns that was 30 years in the waiting in arguably the greatest college football game of all-time during the 2006 Rose Bowl victory over the USC Trojans. I watched in amazement as the Boston Red Sox went from down 0-3 against the hated New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series to winning their next 7 games in a row to capture their first World Series title in 86 years.

I've seen Will Smith go from winning the first ever Grammy award presented for Rap music to becoming Hollywood's most bankable leading man. And speaking of the Grammys, I've also witnessed Jethro Tull defeat Metallica for the first ever Heavy Metal Grammy.

My first musical listening device was an actual record player that I received secondhand from my uncle, along with many beloved secondhand vinyl albums; before moving onto cassettes, cds, and now mp3s. From a ghetto blaster boom-box that took a dozen D-sized batteries to operate to a Sony Disc Walkman and now my iPod with 80 gigs of memory for music, movies, pictures and games.

When I was born a former B-Movie actor was in the White House. Now, god forbid someone like Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon or Natalie Maines express their political opinions before there are riots of complaint and overreaction.

In almost 27 years, I've seen the world grow and change in many ways. But I can only wish that Tupac were here today to witness what I've just witnessed and wonder what kind of verse he would come up with now. What rhymes with Obama?