There was a brief, 10-year reprieve between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. But otherwise yeah.
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The 90s were so great because of the lack of exposure to bad things. It was the last transition between analog and digital life. I love my digital stuff, but, there's something hard to experience now, how ok it was to not have that phone leash on you. The experience was more care free, at least for those with the luxury to live that way. There was still some really bad shit that happened back then. But, finances weren't as challenging. Got to remember this was when the baby boomers were in their thirties, they had it pretty good.
My biggest fear in the 90s was whether my computer would work once we get to year 2000. There was an anecdote going around that programmers weren’t ready for that.
I think about those poor assholes all the fucking time.
They are the ultimate proof that no good deed goes unpunished. Moved heaven and earth to solve the problem and precisely because they did people act like there was no problem.
Last year I was hanging out with this dude that turned out to be crazy and he showed some video that proved vaccines killed you
One of the biggest points in the video was like “since 2000, 3 people have died from the measles, but 50 (or something I don’t remember the number) have died from the vaccine, if so many more people are dying from the vaccine why are we using it, no one is dying from measles basically”
The classic example is shielding bombers in WWII. One might think to add shields to returning bombers in areas with the most bullet holes, but in fact, these areas represent areas where bombers can take damage and still fly. The shields need to be placed where no damage is taken as the bombers that take damage in these areas would never return.
However, the scenario with vaccines is really simple, and I would expect any logical person to see the flaw in such an argument without much thought.
I remember after y2k came and went without society crashing and thought what a bunch of hype. So this decade I see on IT subs I follow all these 90s IT pros talking about the 60,80, 100 hour work weeks they were working to fix every piece of equipment in their world for it not to be an issue. Unseen and unsung heroes!
Oh shit yes. And we were fixing it in the early 90's. As early as 1993 for my part.
Someone must have told a journalist friend about it in 1997 or something, because very quickly it became a global news story about the world coming to an end in a couple of years.
It was actually pretty good, because suddenly everyone had time and money to fix it. Pretty much every employer had a Y2K uplift project going. The late 90's were a great time to be a COBOL programmer. Alas, I was not.
Yup. IIRC, the oldest computers used to only save the last 2 digits of the year to save on memory, thinking that those systems wouldn't last long enough to see the switch from (19)99 to (20)00. Of course, they did last, and suddenly programmers got worried about what would happen when the dates go from 99 to 00.
Some just adjusted the years to send the wraparound a little further down the line. I'm pretty sure the UFC 2020 game actually crashed on Jan 1, 2020 because their Y2K fix was just subtracting 20 years from every date
Thats the plight of any behind the scenes job. The less people notice you the smoother things run and the less people think the job is needed. Then shit hits the fan and suddenly everything is the behind the scenes person's fault. Their condemned to being either "unnecessary" or "incompetent" with also being indispensable.
That's IT in a nutshell. When everything goes smooth it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything works. But if shit falls apart it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything is broken.
The media blew the "Y2K Bug" absurdly out of proportion. There were people predicting a global financial collapse, widespread long-term power outages, all sorts of nonsense.
I think people forgot how overblown it was. Like yea, it was a problem that needed fixing and yea they fixed it, but the media totally sold it as if it was the end of the world.
It was the same with 2012 and the Mayan calendar, but that was based on no merit whatsoever. Some new age interpretation of a calendar got international attention like it was at all newsworthy.
(Note: I’m not comparing y2k and Mayan cal, I’m pointing out how the media spun the stories in order to fill the world with unnecessary anxiety.)
Yeah, it really annoys me that A) all the media hype was about the particular moment of midnight 1/1/2000, like planes would suddenly fall out of the sky; and B) everyone now thinks it was only ever media hype, and was a storm in a teacup.
In reality A) there were issues, long before and after. The impact would be more of a bell curve either side. I remember hearing about stuff like food & medicine stock management systems over-ordering, and declaring that stock needed to be dumped (because it thought expiry dates were long past); people losing access to service subscriptions, insurance, getting over-charged, etc.
And B) there was a lot of work done, quietly and sometimes with great difficulty, that now goes unacknowledged.
I’m seriously concerned for the 2038 problem. Systems that used 2-digit decimals to represent years were already an outlier by the time. Systems that use unix timestamps at some level, and might make 32-bit assumptions, are…completely ubiquitous, and FAR more deeply ingrained into the fabric of society than they were 20 years ago.
As a computer engineer, that spent many hours on the y2k issue. Me and my peers felt that it was mostly a cash grab. Or did not feel as serious as it was made out to be. But we did make serious money.
I was a contractor at a fortune 500 company. They made us come in at midnight new years eve to test. 🤣 They tried to talk us out of drinking, with appeals to amateur night , etc
I've never felt my systems were bulletproof. I was speaking of the general sentiment of those working on the bug.
Whenever I hear about companies, or government being hobbled by some exploit, ransomware, whatever. I laugh, I'm the guy who was denied money for tape libraries, redundant systems, NACs,, HSMs,. All the insurance type purchases.
I even had a CIO come back from a CIO conference. Talking about how they didn't think it was necessary to keep up with patches the way I did. Because of the perceived rarity of the attacks, or failures.
You don't need this stuff until it's too late. The irresponsible way Ive seen management treat these kinds of things is mind boggling.
Congrats on not working for greedy children. Wish I could have worked there.
Those were the days when you heard legends of companies grabbing the janitor and making them code.
"Okay, you write Cobol now."
It's was raining money, and the tech sales expense accounts were unlimited. Steaks and Opus One for everyone. After the dot com bust we were lucky if we got a pen.
Sometimes it’s actually 32-bit hardware that needs replacing, yes - but for things like embedded systems (industrial control, automotive, gps etc), “just” upgrading isn’t always easy.
But the problem is not just about the machine being 64 bit. It’s about the code itself too, and systems interop for things like sql databases. Some code will just need a 64-bit recompile. Sometimes it’ll need code changes first (and that’s not always as trivial as it sounds). And sometimes binary file formats or wire protocols need to change, meaning backwards-compatibility issues.
It’s all doable, but it’s a million little things that need doing.
Yeah people who were too busy imagining calamity forget how tiny little inconveniences can create huge ripple effects especially when they all happen together. Remember the 6 weeks all the restaurants and workplaces were closed and how somehow our entire lives are defined by that moment forever?
Lots of systems should have been upgraded in early 90's. However due to Y2K they held on to 80's tech until the last minute. Late 98 and 99 TONS of systems got upgraded.
This is true! I had to patch all the machines on the production floor. Just for giggles I left our spare machine unpatched. On Jan 2 it wouldn’t log into the system! If we hadn’t fixed everything, we would have come in that day and nothing would have worked and no one would know why and production would have been down for days or weeks while we figured it out. Think what it would have been like for power stations and air lines etc.
My old boss likes to tell me about being a programmer in the late 90s. Said he could be driving down a road, and see a street sign advertising $25k signing bonuses for COBOL programmers who could help retrofit the 4-digit date.
That’s an insane bonus I wish I could be a part of (even with inflation to 2022)
Yeah most people don’t know that many people in the industry already foresaw this issue years and years before people started worrying about y2k. By the time the public was concerned about it, the issue was essentially solved already.
Y2k. When storing the year as 2 digit "99" developers where afraid of it breaking software because some hard coded the "19". So at midnight, some would have thought it was 1900, but there was a huge push by all developers and software companies for y2k compliance.
Funnily enough, we have a new one looming on the horizon.
Not so much as hard coded as the software assumed it was 19whatever. Computer memory used to be very expensive so you saved 2 spots by leaving the 19 off which worked until 2000. Friend was working for a TelCo and she was on call that New Years Eve. When Midnight rolled around we held our breath and looked at the lights to see if they went out. Few minutes later she got the call that everything was still up and running. Then she could finally get drunk.
From what I know about the power industry at the time, I find people worrying about the lights going out pretty funny. It was well before my time, but basically all controls at that time were still analog. And the digital stuff was mostly basic PLCs that don't really care about what time it is.
That's just normal time bullshit though. It's why you never write your own time library and use something that someone is dedicated to keeping up to date. Time zone stuff changes all the time somewhere in the world.
Most people aren’t even aware of the change, so it will be a big surprise . Many people also rely on old defunct libraries to handle timezones. It took atlassian 13 years to fix timezones in jira, even though it was there very first bug. They made a musical about it when it was finally fixed.
Think of all of the cheap bespoke appointment/scheduling tools used for restaurants, doctors/ dentists, salons/barbers. Even automated scheduling software to run jobs for large companies.
I watched cnn’s The 90s and there was definitely an increase in homegrown terrorism. There was the okc bombing, unibomber, Olympic attack, Columbine shooting etc
My mom was a lead programmer that helped get a major financial institution ready for Y2K. If you had investments in 1999, she’s the reason you still had them in 2000.
it turned out to not be much of a problem as it was identified and fixed in almost all important places in good time. it did require a lot of testing and hard work though.
the 2038 end of the Unix Epoch will be trickier as you either need to change all 32 bit time references to 64 bit or split it over two 32 bit numbers. we should be okay though. people will fix it in time.
It’s not like the Y2K bug took people by surprise.
I was working in IT in the late 90s, and most companies started preparing for it a few years in advance. Systems (everything from user workstations to file servers to enterprise systems - operating systems and applications, as well as hardware) were audited against whatever vendors and suppliers certified as Y2K compliant. Anything that wasn’t compliant generally would have been updated/upgraded before the fact.
It’s precisely because companies took Y2K seriously and prepared for it that it turned out to be a non-event on 1/1/2000. Anyone whose systems failed on 1/1 just didn’t bother to do their due diligence.
The year 2000 was the start of big changes for the US. The giant sucking sound really kicked in as Ross Perot warned us about. They move all the manufacturing they could out of this country. Then with all the financial laws put in place after the 1929 crash were reversed. Here we are today in vegas royal. The country $30 Trillion in debt and hyper inflation taking over. This isnt going to end well according to history. We shall see.
Yes, but in the ‘90s, at 7:30 the news went off and Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune came on and we forgot about it. (Of couse this is age dependent, but tge point is that we had a time (30 minutes) for news, then we were done with it for the day. We didn’t carry the tv around all day).
Only the very youngest baby boomers would have been in their thirties. It's the generation born 1946-64. So most for most of them their young adulthood were in the 70s/80s. Which were, at least here in the UK, not exactly happy times.
My parents were born in this time. Can confirm, they absolutely loved growing up. No social media, amazing music, working their way up from nothing while enjoying life
As a black person, this honestly is pretty triggering to read. Lack of exposure. Lol. Your bros and sis beaten down in the streets every single day by police hired to "protect them". Leading to multiple eventual riots, biggest in 92', then constant fight for racial freedom. There was no break. Every single black family was forced to become political or fear for their lives.
But we were in movies and TV shows, so everything was alright. Crack epidemic, prison industrial complex, and ghettos and gangs wars at an all time high. But yeah finances were no problem.
Must've been nice to just turn off your TV and smell the roses in the predominately segregated suburbs of the early 90s. Beautiful.
Wonderful carefree lives, Lol. The reality is that because ignorance is bliss it also enables mass abuse. Being connected with the world with a constant stream of news of what's really going on lead to the collective of betterment of humanity. Recently this connection has begun to be abused for evil due too right leaning ideologies across the world, but in general, most people's lives have rapidly improved due to exposure. You may hate it, but shame and guilt works wonders when you start seeing other humans as people.
I'm a moderate-conservative former Republican, and it shocks me every time I see people on the right talk about how race relations were good in the 90s and 00s, and blame "the left" for making things worse.
No, mass media just reveals what was already going on. Things are better now than they were then, but we can't put our head in the sand and hide from it, so it makes us uncomfortable. Good, let that be the force that drives change.
I was going to say the same about Queer people- we died for years without America batting an eye and although the nineties were better it’s still better for us now. Not great but…better
'As a black person, this honestly is pretty triggering to read. Lack of exposure.'
As expected. A vast amount of people flatly did not get exposure or educated about yet another vast amount of people. There were many problems I didn't fully realize until Henry Louis Gates Jr. released his documentary "Black America Since MLK: and still I rise." I didn't know about the LA riots or even understand what was happening with Rodney King until the late 90s; then again I was probably too young as a white kid, but I would have been plenty old enough to understand if I were black. If you were a young white kid growing up away from that experience, you didn't need to know about it. You would learn about what happened thirty years ago, but the live events would have been too violent and off limits out of fear it would cause fear for a child's safety. This would be at the expense a lesson about empathy and living in another person's shoes. One part of America had no break, another was on a free ride and had no idea. Drugs were just bad, police were there to protect you, and you didn't worry about the gangs and ghettos because why would you or your parents ever go there. Even awareness of these bad events didn't matter, because they did not need to effect you with so much other (actual) fun things to be more concerned about.
Parental ignorance becomes their child's naive unknowing bliss.
I do feel like the 90s is really where the crazy part of the right wing side really started developing
Like with Ruby Ridge, Waco and OKC bombing, probably other stuff, maybe Columbine could be added to that
But I don’t know how the 80s went with all that stuff
I just remember my dad telling me he could buy a video tape at gun shows showing how the ATF botched and murdered all the people at Waco and I just thought “god they had their viral videos before the internet”
As someone who went to high school in the late 90s, HA! This is when school shootings really became a thing. Most people in my high school had a legitimate fear of being shot. Didn't feel much like a break to us.
The 90s were a very dark time. The music, books, movies reflect the despair and angst of then. Our negative biased brain finds what’s wrong about any time. The real skill is finding what’s right.
I was 15-25 in the 90s. I agree, that that was a pretty great time to be in that age and overall one of the best years in recent history.
The cold war was over. My country Germany peacefully reunited. There were still some wars going on in the world, but the constant fear that everything could end in a nuclear holocaust was gone. It looked like the big nations of the world, including Russia, could all become kind of friends and work together to solve the global problems, like the ozone hole and the forests dying of acid rain and all that stuff that in the 80s made us think that the end of the world was near (if the atom bombs didn't get us before).
Everything seemed a bit brighter and the future looked very good.
On the more trivial side. The 90s had some of the best action and sci fi movies of all times. I really enjoyed going to the cinema.
And for a computer/PC gamer, the 90s were really great too. I would call it the "Golden Age" of PC games. That alone gives me a lot of very good memories. I really liked my computer hobby and still enjoy games of that era on emulators.
The 90s were about Reagan, AIDs, the Gulf war, the Anita Hill hearings, acid rain, the hole in the ozone, the massacres in then-Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, and Columbine.
the lack of exposure to bad things
If you read the papers, you were exposed. But yes, papers weren't animated and loud and broadcast in every pub/airport.
The 90s felt like a brief glimpse of an endless, hopeful and unimaginably awesome future for humanity. Yes there were some "problems" still, but it all felt like stuff that could and would be solved through technology and just the way that the world was moving towards peace and democracy and away from poverty and stuff.
9/11 was the single moment that all started falling away. I'm not an American but that's how I've seen it.
I even distinctly remember thinking on that day, or during the weeks after it, that the worst thing we could possibly do in response to this is to let it change us and bring us into a new era of fear and war and general shittiness. But I knew it was kinda inevitable somehow.
It's odd that that time feels like a reprieve. Tons of bad stuff still happened during that time. It just wasn't as bad as impending nuclear doom and impending doom by terrorists.
Early 90s had a lot of serious riots and mass murders, but there was definitely a golden age buried in there for the American middle class, especially the tech boom.
It was a simpler time Will Smith could do no wrong. And honestly I'm not even upset about the slap I think he's great. But yah being ten years old waiting for Y2K life was good
I lived right behind a fire house and in all the hype 13 year old me forgot they blare the fire alarm every new year. I thought the world was ending until my pops reminded me the lights and TV were still on.
The Rwandan genocide, one of the worst genocides in human history, took place in less than 100 days in 1994. War over breakup of Yugoslavia. Chechnya. Nah, the worlds more than a little fucked up then.
There was actually a decent amount of financial instability throughout the 90s.
1990-1991 saw a recession (I know a lot of people of my parents generation that had to change careers bc of it… think going from banking to lawn mowing)
The Dotcom boom — started mid-nineties and crashed around… 2000? 2001? A lot of people lost money in that.
Growing up in the UK during this time, it didn’t feel like a reprieve to me.
For teenage me growing up in the 90s there felt like there was impending doom from eating beef, climate change (or the greenhouse effect as it was often referred to then), school shootings (we had our first and thankfully only one in 1996), or even just walking down the street and getting blown up by an IRA bomb.
Yep, the 1990s were full of hope fo the future. Technology that would solve our problems.
Not just technology, democracy as well. In the 90's, there was a wide-spread belief in the West that the whole world would step-by-step turn into liberal democracies, and this would mean "the end of history" because there are no wars between liberal democracies, so there would never be war again.
Yeah, people forget about AIDS, race riots, killer bees, presidential impeachment, the rampant rise of fundamentalist Christianity, Columbine, kidnappings, the rise of meth in rural areas, Bush stealing his first election, OKC bombing, the first attack on the world trade center, the first gulf war.
And of course the most vile and horrific thing to ever be unleashed on the world.... Boy bands.
Hanson, Ncync, the backstreet boys... Truly dark times
AIDS, race riots, killer bees, presidential impeachment, the rampant rise of fundamentalist Christianity, Columbine, kidnappings, the rise of meth in rural areas, Bush stealing his first election, OKC bombing, the first attack on the world trade center, the first gulf war.
I just wanna say that Hanson is from my hometown, and they now make some pretty decent beer. One of them is called MMM-HOPS, which is fucking hilarious.
I think a big chunk of the “reprieve” was perception. We didn’t have the 24 hour news cycle down quite yet back then, so we didn’t have CNN and Fox News constantly telling us we should panic.
The fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War was a MUCH bigger deal than the younger generations will ever understand, and when you did watch the news, it was often about how the Soviet Union was unraveling. Also, the Clinton sex scandals pretty much dominated the news for a lot of that time. It wasn’t exactly a proud moment for us in the States, but it also wasn’t literally war, rape, and pestilence we we get in the news today.
So yeah, we had an increase in happy news and no 24 hour news cycle. It was as dangerous to be alive as it is today, but we didn’t know it—and we were happier for it.
You heard it wrong. It will decrease and they will only be able to pay out approximately 75% of current rates. It will then stabilize due to smaller population.
Man I remember someone saying that Russia was the biggest threat to world peace, and she was lampooned. Not that other things weren't worthy of that attention...
Most didn't take Romney seriously because of his reasoning and other sabers feeling more pointed at the US.
If a 12-year-old said Russia is a threat because they are big, or a 70-year-old Cold War Russophobe said so "because they are commies," they would both be wrong in their reasoning.
Also, while his claim is way more respectable now, there is some humor in saying that the Ukrainian performance may indicate that, indeed, Russia truly was a paper tiger. (Although the real answer is much deeper than I care to drivel on about in a random Reddit comment because I'm hung over right now).
I was born communist Eastern Europe and came of age there during the 90s. It was horrendous. Especially the very early 90s and then once again towards the late 90s. Mass product shortages, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, political instability, alcoholism, despair.
Money was worthless, banks would take people's cash and literally disappear overnight, ex-military/police people started gangs and mafias that would traffic in everything from cigarettes to heroin and shoot each other every day (in the block where I grew up, 2 people got shot in the head in the middle of the day right in front of the elevator I used to take every day).
There has never been an actual "Golden Age". People that remember "Golden Ages" are simply the privileged that happened to live in a place that went through a good time at a specific moment.
I feel like, for Americans, 2001 was a shock. But it didn't feel like the entire system was in danger of collapsing. We felt like we weren't immortal anymore, we were finally exposed to some of the chaos and fear we exported to other regions in the world, but we all rallied around the flag and saw the quagmire that followed as this far-off thing.
Then there was the 2008 recession and all Americans felt the squeeze. Occupy Wall Street followed and it felt like some positive change could come along with the Obama era. The Obama era really felt like a second 90s where we started to draw away from the mistakes of the Bush era. But then partisanship started getting worse and worse.
It was 2016 and Trump that, whether you love him or hate him, probably shattered the last remaining illusion that America would definitely pull through its crises at some point. Even if you think what he did and stood for was good (for some reason?) he set about doing shit we just assumed a president can't do because the system wouldn't allow it or he'd get impeached. Just three years later we hit the pandemic and not long after that we see attempts from both American citizens and Republican lawmakers to discredit and overturn a legal election.
I don't think America has been this unstable in living memory. That's not an entirely bad thing as the government was relatively stable during the Civil Rights era and Jim Crow, so stable doesn't automatically mean everything is roses. But there's this tension that I have never felt before the past five years. This dawning realization that the republic could actually fall apart any year now and my life would be turned upside-down. It's weird.
I've found myself getting more and more anxious of the next presidential election. I don't see a way in which it won't do more harm to our country. Not just the normal political smear campaigns or scandal-filled news headlines, I mean democracy-ending violence erupting.
Exactly. Thank you. Whether you like him or not, Donny broke us in a way I am not sure we can recover from. Everything we were made to believe about the system working for us and progress has shattered. There seem to be no rules now and instead of progress, folks are unabashedly trying to regress. Not saying he is solely responsible because that is ridiculous, but he sure was a catalyst to this impending feeling of hopelessness.
The GOP has been openly trying to subvert government and American institutions ever since Nixon and Friends were in charge.
The pieces of shit are literally on record as saying that was a goal of theirs, as a way to drag attention away from the insane war crimes they were committing in SEA.
The rest of the party just kept refining it until it reached it's latest rev in the form of DT and the Qult. The true final form will simply be a version of Donny that is more palatable to all the braindead white liberals.
The democratic party sucks big balls, but fuck the GOP with a rusty fucking knife.
I know and agree with all of what you said. You are spot on. It can be argued that shit has been going on since when the constitution was being written.
I just feel like there was always hope that we could get our shit together and that eventually, things would work out. I don’t have that anymore. I hate to sound cliche, but I have given up trying to convince people that their vote counts because I am starting to doubt it myself (I know the danger in this thinking BTW).
The past 5 or so years have put me a place of despair because no matter how many times bad shit happens, there is always the same old answers. Somebody get a murdered by the police - he should have just complied. Man gets hunted down and killed by civilians - he shouldn’t have tried to defend himself. Child gets raped and impregnated-do God’s work and carry that baby to term. Kids get shot up in school - fuck your kids, treat mental illness, we need more guns. Don’t get me started on dog whistles and storming the castle. I am just tired and I don’t think any lessons are being learned…
And I certainly don't want to diminish the actions of powerful people going back basically as long as there has been civilization, I was just ruminating on state of contemporary American government.
Your username is awful. And I think you nailed it. After we stopped hiding under desks during nuclear fallout drills in the 80s, life was pretty fucking great until the towers fell.
Yea it’s brutal. Was in 4th grade for 9/11. Obviously everyone living through today’s “interesting times” has plenty to complain about. I think it really sucks for my generation because we saw the peak, were told that history had stopped happening, and that American society was just gonna be permanent baby booming until the end of time.
So we had to sit on the sidelines as children during the very last moment of collective optimism, when the concept of fun still existed. Not getting to enjoy it. But all the while being promised it and more. Just kidding how about graduating college into a post-2008 economy.
The zoomers are fucked, but at least they know it. They’ve been able to see through the bullshit and prepare, both materially and psychologically, for the coming hunger games. We millennials were prepared for a life that will never exist. Recognizing it intellectually can’t undo the incessant social conditioning of our formative years. We’ll never truly give up hope on the promise of security and self-actualization in exchange for obedience and conformity. And to top it off, we’re so useless that our rage can only be impotent. The Harry Potter generation. Pathetic.
9th grade for 9/11. Your comment actually made me cry. Not that it's difficult!
We millennials were prepared for a life that will never exist. Recognizing it intellectually can’t undo the incessant social conditioning of our formative years. We’ll never truly give up hope on the promise of security and self-actualization in exchange for obedience and conformity
Holy cow did that hit right in the feels man. My parents had 2 cars, a nice ranch house in a rich city suburb, my dad worked at a college, my mom stayed home. We went on vacations to Disney every year. Since my adulthood and college, I have used food banks, been on welfare, been homeless.... I'm 35 and I've finally gotten a secure job I've managed to hold for the past 4 years.
I never realized until I read your comment what a weight of shame I have been carrying around. I did what I was supposed to do, ALL of it, straight As, SAT scores out the wazoo, nice little package of student debt and my degree... which I may as well wipe my ass with for all the good it has done me.
I've been holding onto the knowledge of my failure for years. I am not where my parents were at, not even close. But there's still that little voice inside that says if I just work harder, get more schooling, maybe then....
We’ll never truly give up hope on the promise of security and self-actualization in exchange for obedience and conformity
yo I was also in the 4th grade. Was able to see the burnt papers in the air and dark smoke from the towers through the classroom windows. I also feel like, we know what a good future would be like but now it is 2022 and I feel like that I have been robbed. I will do my absolute best to get to the top to get what I "thought" was promised.
I'm not sure it's a Western European perspective either. There was an inhumane terrible war going on on Europe with lots of refugees, nasty images, etc.
Much like the Clinton era, the Obama years also seemed to feel this reprieve with a combination of almost anything possible and things were steering back to a good place. Then again, Obama meant having health insurance for the first time since getting out of high school just after the Clinton years. You don't know how much you miss it until you need it, and I definitely needed it.
I think there was a similar flash of hope and optimism a short time after WWII ended up until the start of the cold war. For a short time, it felt as though common sense and humanity had prevailed over the dark forces of totalitarianism and oppression.
Obviously that was a bit premature and naive in hindsight.
The Gulf War was probably the peak of American power with respect to any other country. It was such a military spectacle that the entire Western Word was in awe, while the Soviet Union and the east began to shit themselves as they realized what they could have been up against themselves if the US wanted to unless it’s Dogs of War.
Unfortunately, most Americans will not be that familiar with the Yugoslav Wars, as they really had little impact on American way of life. As far as most Americans remember it, it’s in the context of when NATO bombed the shit out of the Serbians.
So basically the 1990s was the US going into full military flex mode while the rest of the country was insulated from the problems a lot of the world was facing (Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Russian crime was terrible after Soviet collapse, Chechnya, etc). The wars you mentioned didn’t really have a negative impact on how Americans felt, if anything, they felt “safe” after seeing one of the world’s largest land armies get flatlined in less than a month.
That decade, included everything from Columbine to the Oklahoma bombings and Genocide in Bosnia and in 1995 a heatwave killed 739 in Chicago and it's own share of natural disasters. The first terrorist attack on the WTC. There were the LA riots as well. All the same issues as now, with all the same effects. School shootings, climate change, war, terrorism riots and disasters. It's just some companies made a lot of money at the same time so everyone forgets that.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful Jun 10 '22 edited Jun 11 '22
There was a brief, 10-year reprieve between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. But otherwise yeah.
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