Not to bum you out but the 90s being good is because you were a kid. For example, in '96, they were “cracking down on welfare queens” in a bipartisan welfare reform effort that specifically fucked over poor folk and people of color in a conservative effort to force work requirements while simultaneously making it harder to claim disability.
You still had racial redlining, war on drugs, satanic panic, homophobia, child abuse, bullying, etc… people were just less informed because the Internet was in its infancy.
Actually let me put a positive spin for young people; today is probably better (on average) to grow up because of all the advances in education, medicine, psychology, etc.; people actually have their psychological needs addressed more, die of illness less, and are generally more educated than in the 90s-- hell, every generation is about 10-15 IQ higher than the previous, you just don’t see it since it’s standardized and set to 100. Not that IQ is a great metric for intelligence, but it’s a good indicator that people are more educated than previously.
When people talk about the 90s being good and better than today, they aren’t just remembering being a child or waxing poetic like boomers do about the 50s. What they are actually talking about is the hope and inspiration that came with the New World Order and everything else that was going on in the 90s.
People don’t remember it but first world country doesn’t mean better country it means NATO country. Second world was referring to countries aligned with the Warsaw Pact, and third world were countries not aligned with either. When the second world fell at the end of the Soviet Union the expectation was that the second world would become part of the first world and the third world would begin it moves towards being a benevolent second world and eventually become part of the first world too.
In addition to a political upheaval that was representative of the relief of decades of Cold War, there were also huge scientific advances being made. Things like the International Space Station, Hubble, and the Voyager program were all returning science and becoming realities. We had just discovered for instance that Jupiter had rings. Not to mention things like the Montreal Accords.
It was also a time of a second coming of the civil rights movement, the 90s are when it became OK to be gay for the most part. 1992 was The Year of the Woman, largely in response to and in spite of the Anita Hill debacle. There was an open-mindedness and a willingness to accept progress that just disappeared a few years later.
It’s that, that hope and willingness to accept science, that’s what people miss about the 90s, and it’s what people were really hoping Obama would bring back.
And I fully recognize that the Rush Limbaughs and Fox Newses of the world where already well passed the point of no return for killing off this feeling well before the 90s came around. I’m just talking about why people wax poetic about the 90s and it’s not just people who were kids, even my parents talk about what it was like to be gay and out in the 90s and the hope and inspiration that came with that.
Hard disagree, that hope and inspiration nonsense is totally ahistotical and the exact same thing boomers do with the 1950s and 60s (for them it was the atomic age and sexual revolution and being optimistic that fascism and world wars were behind them)
When the second world fell at the end of the Soviet Union the expectation was that the second world would become part of the first world and the third world would begin it moves towards being a benevolent second world and eventually become part of the first world too.
And a bunch of first world hopes that everyone would just forget all coups and death squads and other terrible stuff we did in the cold war, and hopes that we could all just finally forget about fighting for civil rights and the environment and other tough stuff like that because we’d somehow permanently solved those issues and could just turn everything over to markets.
It was also a time of a second coming of the civil rights movement, the 90s are when it became OK to be gay for the most part
Matthew Shepherd was murdered in 1998, legal rights like health insurance access for partners and hospital visitations wouldn’t come til decades later, we were still educating most people on the fact that AIDS wasn’t just a gay disease, etc.
1992 was The Year of the Woman, largely in response to and in spite of the Anita Hill debacle
But the Anita Hill debacle did happen, plus Jerry Seinfeld dated a high schooler and nobody thought it was weird, and whether or not sexual harassment was a real thing society needed to care about was still being argued (you can see this in all sorts of pop culture from the time, the whole attack on “political correctness” was all about dudes wanting to be able to say misogynistic shit at the office and not get called out for it)
There was an open-mindedness and a willingness to accept progress
Pundits on TV called black teenagers super predators and said they should be tried as adults and tons of states changed their laws to make it easier to do exactly that
Don’t forget that Clinton was just on the verge of privatizing social security and medicare with republicans when news leaked about the blow job:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/05/29/the-pact-between-bill-clinton-and-newt-gingrich
My stepdad jokes Clinton was his favorite Republican president. This is the reason why. Lol
Uh, the spin says that Gen Alpha maybe losing IQ to AI slop and TikTok because reading comprehension and attention have back slid.
Not sure if we know for sure yet. I do know that it’s not as much a gain from Millennials to Zs, though I don’t recall the numbers. Internet babies definitely saw a nice gain, though.
Ah the 90s
When we had the Bosnian genocide happen at the same time as the Rwandan genocide and Clinton was busy blowing bubbles in office instead of undoing the now permanent damage Reagan and Bush caused.
You remember
Is a $60 tank of gas considered a lot in America?
Yeah, apparently it is. When you look at the median income and how cheap so many things are you realise why the people haven’t burned everything down yet.
Things are being burnt down, but our media figured out after a couple of burnt warehouses that people were cheering so they stopped talking about it.
Nobody in 1998 had the slightest idea what <3 meant.
Yeah, they did. Source: I lived it.
Unfortunately, we didn’t heed the warning, and so, here we are.
We tend to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
We yearn for that time when we didn’t need to worry about rent and work a job we hate for most of our waking hours.
You’re high on mushrooms in the Viking age, the gods are all around you
Is it sadder for us, or for those who will never know how good it was? Imagine being born today. Seems terrible.
$60 tanks of gas is exactly what we used to pay here in the 90s, funny enough. And those weren’t US sized tanks either.
I wish it were only sixty bucks for a full tank of gas.
Quick! Buy stock in Microsoft and watch for this new company Amazon!!
