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I'm writing this because it might be informative for people who weren't around during the period of history I'm discussing. Also it helps me get some things off my chest and organize random thoughts that have been rolling around in my head for a few years.
I was born in that mini-generation sandwiched between Gen X and Millennials. Were we the ass-end of Gen X or the first wave of Millennials? The answer depends on whom you ask and when you asked the question; Wikipedia tells me that we were the last wave of Gen X. I'v also heard us described as the "home computer generation" or the "Oregon Trail generation", since we were the first to grow up with home computers, and many of us fondly remember playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II. Regardless, we -- and older Millennials -- have lived through a lot of history. And most of it hasn't been good.
I've written previously about how our government has been deliberately sabotaged, starting with the election of the B-movie actor and HUAC stool pigeon Ronald Reagan. I was born a few years before America elected him.
We were children during the last -- and craziest -- decade or so of the Cold War. I say the craziest because the nuclear arms race was at its peak. And if you were a particularly aware child, as I was, you knew it and knew that the end of the world was a very real possibility.
The 1980s were the decade when mass incarceration really started to get going, mostly thanks to the "war on drugs."
This was also the era of "stranger danger" and the Satanic Panic. Both the authority figures in our lives and the surrounding culture, such as television, taught us to live in a constant state of fear.
Even so, life was comparatively peaceful in the United States. As late as 2001, no one would have imagined a United States in which a person was subjected to a body scan just to fly on an airplane. For what it's worth, nowadays I have to go through a security checkpoint every time I go to the hospital. While we're talking about air travel, it's worth noting that the planes were roomier. It was comparatively comfortable, whereas nowadays, being on an airplane feels like being a sardine in a can.
We saw the end of the Cold War. I remember my dad telling me in 1989 and early 1990 that I was living through history being made.
Then, unthinkable things started happening. On April 19th of 1995, a bomb improvised by a white supremacist nutter named Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City happens to be my home town, and I lived there at the time. I knew at least one person who died in that bombing. Others had "near misses." For instance, my mom was supposed to visit the Social Security office in that building on the morning of the 19th, but she overslept! I was in school when the bomb went off. I felt the ground shake and heard the windows vibrate, even though I was miles away. At the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack carried out on American soil.
At the same time, violence in schools was on the upswing. We actually had a metal detector in our high school. This was in 1996: years before the Columbine shooting. Yet the culture of fear was in full force. As kids, we were raised with Satanic Panic and stranger danger; as teens, we had metal detectors in our schools.
In September of 2001, we lived through yet another history-making moment, as the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by airplanes flown by terrorist hijackers. At the time and for quite a few years after the fact, I would have said "allegedly flown", because I was a 9/11 truther. I'm not anymore.
For Baby Boomers, the Kennedy Assassination was the sort of event that caused everyone to remember where they were and what they were doing at the time. Even some very young Boomers, like one of my mom's ex-husbands, remembered where he was. He was four years old and pissed because the TV had assassination news instead of cartoons. Well, September 11th was our "Kennedy assassination" analog.
I was drinking coffee and talking to my grandmother on the phone when the first plane hit. "You might want to turn on your TV", she said. "A plane just hit the World Trade Center." Shortly afterward, the second plane hit, and she said: "Oh shit! I wonder if this is terrorism." Yes it certainly was.
That's when everything changed. The culture of fear ramped up to 11. Overreaching legislation (the USA Patriot Act) was quickly passed. Forever wars were started. George W. Bush declared war on "terror", analogous to the war on drugs. I'd say that history has proved that you cannot win a war against an abstraction like drugs or terror. Torture funded by US tax-payers and euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" became acceptable to the ruling class and its supporters. Can you really blame my twenty-something ass for being a 9/11 truther? It looked like -- and was -- a shameless power grab.
Fast forward to 2008. Yippy! We get to live through yet another historical moment, as the economy collapses! The owning class and their talking head lackies called it the Great Recession. That's just euphemistic language. It should have been called a depression, but we don't have depressions anymore! Those are a thing of the past! And to think, the only thing we needed to do to avoid them was change the English language!
This is a good time to switch gears and talk about economics. Someone's post on midnight.pub got me thinking.
This has been the pattern for decades. I remember my dad telling me: "Kiddo, your generation and the generations after you are totally fucked." He used to talk about how the owning class kept "raising the bar." Here's an example that he used to give. In the late 1960s, minimum wage was $1.65 per hour. An hour of tuition at a state university in Oklahoma was $5.75. You could put yourself through college working a minimum wage job. By the early 2000s, the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, and an hour of tuition at a state university in Oklahoma cost $52. Minimum wage hasn't been anything close to a living wage in a very long time.
Things haven't been all bad. We've made a few incredible strides, one being marriage equality. But how long will that last? The Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. You can bet that they have their eyes set on Obergefell V. Hodges.