Today is the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four black students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave without being served. While these were not the first sit-ins, they were the most famous, and they quickly spread across the South, and inspired a young generation of civil rights activists. Today, February 1, 2010, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum is opening in Greensboro.

This reminds me of something I was going to write about a month ago but forgot: for the next ten years we will be observing the 50th anniversary of the 1960s. The sit-ins (2010); the building of the Berlin Wall (2011); the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012); the JFK assassination (2013); the Beatles in America (2014); the sending of American ground forces to Vietnam (2015); the premieres of Batman and Star Trek on TV (2016); the Summer of Love (2017); the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (2018); the moon landing (2019). For the next decade it will be one 50th anniversary after another, as the Baby Boomers relive everything that was important to their youth and the rest of us commemorate a pivotal decade.

It’s fun to relive history at the same speed as it happened. For some reason I remember the 50th anniversary of the 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel, commemorated in 1987, when I was 13. At that age I was an avid comic book reader, and I associated the late 1930s with the golden age of comic books (Superman and Batman first appeared in 1938 and 1939, respectively). I remember waiting to drive into the Lincoln Tunnel with my parents, its massive, vaguely Art-Deco edifice looming before us, and imagining that it was the late 1930s and we were driving into crime-ridden Gotham City, just as Bruce Wayne and his parents drove into the city on that fateful night. It seemed like a dark, depressing time and place.

But 23 years have passed since 1987, just as 23 years passed between 1937 and 1960. If I had been born in 1923 instead of 1973, I would be reading about the sit-ins happening right now, and I would be thinking back to when I grew up during the Great Depression. Since the time I was 14, we’ve observed the 50th anniversaries of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the creation of the UN, the birth of TV Guide, the Army-McCarthy hearings, Sputnik. Had I been born 50 years ago, I would remember those actual events, not just the 50th anniversaries of those events.

And this year you can follow a Twitter feed re-enacting JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign in honor of its 50th anniversary. Which makes me think: something like Twitter would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago. What kind of technology will we use to commemorate the 50th anniversaries of the big events of our time, like 9/11 or Obama’s election? Will we have holodecks or brain implants that will let us stand in Grant Park and watch Obama speak on Election Night, or experience Hurricane Katrina or the Beijing Olympics?

Our history was someone else’s current events, just as our current events are someone else’s history.