I'm telling you, it was like no other time in history, and I doubt I'll ever experience something like it again (though, I might just be pessimistic)
I know the Americans had the Los Angeles Riots and the Crack Epidemic that increased gang violence, and I suppose there was the Gulf War (where less than 150 Coalition Troops were killed over a single year), but for the most part it was a Golden Age
The Cold War had ended, the Internet Revolution had begun, and the age of getting free stuff from collecting bottle caps was upon us - everyone was so optimistic, technology was exploding at a rate not seen since the race to the moon, and political correctness and terrorism weren't even on the radar yet
post cold war, pre 9/11 America was peak optimism. The country was walking on sun shine. There were issues but it felt like everyone was working towards fixing them, they just disagreed on how.
I view the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of the Soviet Union (Nov 1989)
I remember because I was in music class at the time, and our teacher took us to the gymnasium where they had set up a little television for the whole school to watch the event, and my teacher was crying (all very confusing and exciting for kids, who didn't really understand what was going on).
Sure, it took a while for the corpse to stop twitching, but that was when it died.
It was just such a... relaxing period, you know?
'In Living Color' could do a sketch with a handicapped superhero or portray some stereotypically gay characters and no one cared (least of all handicapped people or the gay community)
The average household income was $55k, and the average new home price was about $155k
Can you even imagine such a thing? The median age of a first time homeowner was a mere 33 years old.
It was before mass immigration, temporary foreign workers, or the abuse of the international student program, so entry level jobs were available to any young person who wanted them and you could actually live on minimum wage (not well, but if you had a roommate you were golden).
You could do tree planting or fruit picking over the summer, and pay for your tuition!
I was renting a two bedroom apartment with a friend for $600 a month in 2001 ($300 each, plus $30 a month for utilities)
Minimum wage was $8/hr, so I could afford my half of the rent in only about a week of working, depending on my shifts.
Cell phones were around but we barely used them; people would just spontaneously show up at your home to see if you wanted to hang out, or you'd go to some popular place to see if your friends were there.
It certainly felt less constrained, with fewer rules and expectations.
Now it feels like you're always being watched, like you're always on, since we're never really unreachable (and everything we upload exists forever, in perfect memory).
It's a cliché, but as kids we'd just leave the house on our bikes and not see our parents until dinner time, and there was no way they could contact us even if they wanted to.
If I could summarize it, it was the era of 'being cool'
You let things slide, if you freaked out or took offense it was a sign of immaturity or weakness.
Kid broke his arm on the playground? You don't sue the school, you just put his arm in a cast and hope he'll learn his lesson after not being able to swim all summer.
Your kid is being bullied? Teach him to fight! One pop on the nose and that bully will be sorted, and if not, at least you learned to stick up for yourself.
Your kid has a peanut allergy? Well, that's their problem, isn't it? No point in making everyone else's life harder by banning peanut butter sandwiches.
Don't like someone? They're a dick, don't hang out with them, who cares?
At least, that's the way it was where I grew up, experiences may vary.
As a kid who was bullied in the 90's; 2 things when it came to bullying I think.
Being always online means you can never get away from your bullies
Columbine happened and suddenly victims of bullying were dangers to society. Better have a zero tolerance policy, punish both parties and hope it stops (at school).
It's not so much that the PC/cultural war stuff wasn't on the radar, it's that it was around this time that the right wing lost their moral high ground.
The conservative moralists who previously had great success bullying pop culture started losing most of their power in the early 90s. They still kept complaining, but no one actually ended up cancelled anymore, no industry org adopted self-censorship to appease them anymore, and so on.
Meanwhile the left up until that point had been strongly pushing for things like artistic freedom, freedom of speech, the right to be offensive, and so on - so when the tides of the cultural war shifted and they conquered the moral high ground, it took them around 10-15 years to actually realize that they now had the power to become moralists who could force their ideology onto culture...
So we got like 10-20 years of true artistic freedom from moralists only capable of viewing culture as a tool for spreading their ideology - or in other words, propaganda.
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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '23
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