I am interested to know what life was like from the words of people who were still children then or they were from 16-30 years old.
I am interested to know what life was like from the words of people who were still children then or they were from 16-30 years old.
I was born when Carter was POTUS and recall the Regan presidency.
For my perspective the biggest shift isn’t technology or TV always being in color or even that the bigots went from smiling politeness to objects of derision to unapologetic hypocrites. Rather, it was the absence of the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon.
When I was in kindergarten we had air raid drills – what to do if the bombs started falling. Up until the very first Gulf War we lived with a constant awareness that any day could literally end us all, and most of us became extremely cynical because of it. Irony and punk ruled, and it wasn’t until the USSR fell apart that we all collectively realized that life would actually go on without a nuclear apocalypse.
The 90s were essentially one massive party. The cold war has been won, our long wartime compromises were unnecessary, and this fancy new Internet would bring us a future where we were all rich and happy and at peace.
2001 is just outside of your scope, but the terrorist attacks that year were the end of the 90s just like the fall of the Soviet Union was the end of the multi-decade horror that I was born into.
There are a bunch of other weird little things we could go into, like banking by phone or going to an ATM first and then shopping with the cash, or how cigarettes were everywhere and we thought everyone was cis and straight or “weird”, but that constant slow-burning fear is the thing I remember most.
It was so bad, and we were so convinced that doomsday was coming, that on the day of the 9/11 attacks I remember thinking “what took them so long.”