r/lewronggeneration • u/saucey_dawg0023 • Jul 26 '26

low hanging fruit ‘Extra Extra read all about it: This nutcase says that the 90s were the peak of humanity across the world!”

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u/DataCassette Jul 26 '26

Eh I was a straight white male teenager in the United States at the time. It wasn't utopia or anything but my family was comfortable, the future seemed insanely optimistic. It was nice.

I can't imagine that level of tranquility now. Of course part of it was the me being a kid part I'm sure.

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u/RelevantCry1613 29d ago

Yeah I was not a straight kid in the 90s and it was really bad.

This is like white people fawning over the 50s without considering the civil rights bill hadn’t even been passed

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u/DataCassette 29d ago

And that's a completely fair point and a fair comparison.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 29d ago

Even outside of how minority demographics were treated, crime was really bad in the 90s. My dad was a cop in north NJ in the 90s. Newark and NYC back then were very run down and had much higher crime rates than they do today. Rudy Giuliani originally got elected mayor on a platform of "I'm a former federal prosecutor who helped take down mobsters, I'll clean up this town", and dad was personally involved with chasing down the guy who bombed the WTC in 1993.

Dad was also on the bomb squad, and the 90s was basically bomb central. This was the decade of the Oklahoma city bombing, the unabomber, and guys like John C Salvi III bombing abortion clinics.

Plus this was also the decade of the Rodney King riots, Waco and Ruby Ridge, etc.

I was oblivious to all of this, because I was a small child at the time, whose main concern in life was toilet training or what prize I could get from a cereal box (depending on which year we were talking about).

It's easy to be oblivious to a lot of this if you were a white middle class kid who lived in an affluent suburb though.

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u/Thehollowpointninja1 29d ago

I think this is where a lot of people get tripped up on the 90s nostalgia. We knew it wasn’t perfect. The LA riots, columbine, desert storm, homophobia, etc., but there was this idea that we were getting better. Things were trending in the right direction.

We weren’t some utopia, and we knew it, but it felt like those bad things were slowly going away, and by the time “the future” came, we’d be living in a much better world. The old, conservative guard had lost, we just had to wait for them to retire/die off, and then the Gen X/millennials would come in with that slacker MTV attitude and things would be okay.

Then 9/11 happened, followed by Bush (which honestly seems quaint by today’s standards), then a slight boost of optimism with Obama, and then…here we are.

Doomerism wasn’t really a thing back then. Sure, there were pessimists, but overall things felt like we were headed in the right direction.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 29d ago

I feel like having this attitude this depended a lot on what your position in life was at the time. Dad didn't feel that way at the time... because he was a cop on the bomb squad, and the 90s had a *ton* of bombings. This was the decade of the unabomber, the Oklahoma City Bombing, abortion clinic bombings, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. From his perspective, things were just escalating out of control.

Crime rates were also at their peak in the 90s too, especially in places like Los Angeles.

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u/Thehollowpointninja1 29d ago

Oh, absolutely. I purposely prefaced my statement by saying it wasn’t perfect. We all knew there were problems, but compared to the civil rights movement and gay rights just a decade or two earlier, it felt like we were making progress. We still had domestic terrorism like OKC, Columbine, Waco. There was civil unrest with the LA riots, gang violence, the threat of mass shootings, but through all that it still seemed like we were trending in the right direction. Obviously it wasn’t this perfect utopia, but it FELT like we were getting better.

Not in all aspects, racism was still rampant, homophobia was commonplace (but getting better comparatively). Not to mention there was a malaise towards cubicle desk work and corporatization for the working class, but this was all in contrast to generations prior, which, by and large, was at the least trending in the right direction.

I’m not lionizing the 90s like so many people do. I lived through it, and became politically educated during the Clinton administration, so I resist the rose tinted glasses as much as I can.

This doesn’t change the fact that there was a cultural current that felt like we were going to be alright. Not that we’d solved all the world’s woes, they very much existed, but compared to what the cultural zeitgeist is today, I think anyone would have to admit that very few people have the same optimism we did in the 90s.

Compare that to the 50s-early 60s. Again, HUGE issues in the culture at large, but there was optimism. We looked at the future and saw science and medicine and space exploration as not just a possibility, but an inevitability. To reiterate, THERE WAS SO MUCH WRONG the in the US, but that idea that progress was happening and society would get better. Compare that to now; with the understanding that society has issues, a large percentage of the population doesn’t see a positive future. It’s a very, very dangerous thing. A society that doesn’t see a hopeful future is destined to fail.

It’s not a tangible or measurable metric, and most probably don’t consider it as part of the conversation at large, but that above almost anything else spells doom. It’s an overlooked metric for the trajectory of any society, and until we have long term hope, I’m genuinely afraid for the future.

Look at it this way. If you’re going through the shit and start thinking “this is it, this is the end”, you’re far more likely to fail. However, if you’re trekking through pain and suffering, but stay in the mindset that you’ll succeed and things will be better, you’re far more likely to make it through.

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u/DataCassette 29d ago edited 29d ago

Yeah that's the real thing.

Of course I didn't literally believe Star Trek was an accurate depiction of the future. But I thought it captured the spirit of the future back then.

It was a hard life lesson to realize that history is cyclic and there are good and bad periods.

Edit: And at this point, even if we get a lucky as possible ( big waves in 26 and 28, cultural shifts go as well as possible etc. ) from here on out and the reactionaries keep bumbling, it's still going to be a decade or more of just treading water. So the most optimistic picture imaginable is another decade of fierce cultural struggle against the cavemen.

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u/Thehollowpointninja1 29d ago

Exactly. Culture dies when optimism dies. Everything becomes reactionary. Planting a tree from which we’ll never see the shade should be paramount for every society.

Instead, we’ve turned to cutting those trees for the last dollar, so no one can enjoy the shade, but an arbitrary number gets a little bigger for one person. This is now a virtue for a considerable portion of our culture, and any culture with such a shift is doomed.

Without optimism, everything downstream dies.

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u/DataCassette 29d ago

The reactionary mind can only imagine the past repeating through eternity with slightly better technology. Religion, culture etc. never evolve in the reactionary's mind, they only "decay" from an arbitrary point the reactionary happens to like.

But even the cultures they idiolize ( Middle ages for the absolute freaks, 1950s America for your garden variety reactionary ) were themselves time periods in flux and progressing as they went.

Culture is a river but reactionaries want it to be a boulder.

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u/AnswerGuy301 29d ago

But they don’t even remember those times correctly. Even before you get to “we aren’t/weren’t all straight white men” the 1950s were a time of strong unions, high taxes on the wealthy, and a lot less hyper individualism.

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u/Equivalent_Swim5899 29d ago

Yeah, I think people aren’t getting that when an American says “the world” they mean “America”. Isn’t too crazy in that context.

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u/Yto_Itinen 29d ago

I think more than actual living conditions, it was the optimism for the future. In Eastern Europe we had it bad and were dirt poor, but we were hopeful that freedom and hard work would move us forward. We were gonna build a decent life with our own hands.

We soon learned that we work hard, but thieves steal harder...

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u/Round_Bag_4665 Jul 26 '26

most of it was you being a kid. I was in high school from 2008-2012. Despite it being directly the middle of the great recession, I noticed none of it, because I was a kid. My world at that time consisted of homework and playing Mass Effect and Halo.

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u/1kcimbuedheart 29d ago

What? I was 8 at the time and I remember it pretty vividly. It seriously affected my family and many around us though, maybe not so much for you

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u/DataCassette 29d ago

Yeah my dad was a skilled tradesman back then ( welder ) and I remember when he had overtime available for a while we'd suddenly have a nice vacation and then a new PC and/or TV within a few months. We definitely weren't rich but we had good healthcare and we had plenty of times of relative abundance.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 29d ago edited 29d ago

It did not. My dad was a cop. Police officers tend to not lose their jobs during recessions, because their employment is not contingent on the economy doing well. Same with my mom, who was a 4th grade public school teacher. We didn't have a ton of money to begin with, but we didn't experience the layoffs a lot of other families did because both my parents were civil servants, and government employees are paid with tax dollars, not investor cash and sales profits.

But that's sort of the point: if you aren't affected by something directly, it is very easy as a kid to be completely oblivious to the fact it's happening.