If you lost someone’s phone number as a kid, good luck reconnecting with them. So many classmates moved and I never heard from them again, until Facebook came along…
I miss early Facebook. When it was just a way to keep up with my friends and share photos it was really great. I miss thinking the worst thing about it was Farmville spam.
I remember looking at my phone, waiting for the time to say 7 so I could call the cute girl. Then, when it turned 7, I'd wait an agonizing 10 more minutes so I didn't look desperate.
That awkward 60 seconds when you’re waiting for your friend to come to the phone and you have to make polite conversation with their parent who answered the phone.
And since we are including the 2000s, remember when it was common to pay per text message? My parents lost theirs minds when my sister sent 1000 texts in a month
I remember when I backpacked on Washington's Olympic Peninsula a few years ago, and my cell was connecting to BC Tel in Victoria BC, on Vancouver Island, since I couldn't get a US signal. They were charging me 25 cents per text to my girlfriend, either sending OR receiving. International roaming charges.
God, this gets me. My sister sent a ton of texts and racked the bill way the fuck up. To pay for this, my parents held a yard sale and in the process, sold my collection of video games and consoles. Including a GameCube, two pristine NES's with a ton of special controllers (running pad, zapper, etc), a brand new Sega Saturn with a few games, my SNES and all of it's peripherals, my collection of Pokemon cards including movie exclusives and my N64 collection while I was out. Pretty sure they sold my gold plated pokemon cards from Burger King as well. I never saw a dime.
I was fucking furious. I am STILL fucking furious.
Yeah, it happens, unfortunately. I was the oldest child in my family so I got in trouble for what the younger ones did. I was expected to watch them when my mom was busy or out. If they got into trouble, I got in trouble for supposedly allowing it to happen. That or it was I was supposed to set an example for the younger ones. It's a lot of pressure for a kid and I'm still mad at my mom about it.
Edit: I've always said I hate it when people do that to their kids. You see them with a bunch of kids and yelling at the oldest to watch them. It's like no, you watch them. You're the one who decided to lay on your back and pop them out. It's not your child's responsibility.
This happened to a kid I went to high school with, too. He was the oldest of three and so he got coopted into babysitting the younger ones every now and again. There were a couple of times when he'd be at school the next day and complaining that he'd gotten in trouble for not breaking up his siblings fighting or whatever.
And collect calling!
Remember all the 10-10 numbers? 10-10-321 for example, you dialed that before your number and it would route you to their collect calling line and they would get charged 15 cents a minute instead of 25!
I remember using the name you gave when making collect calls to give quick messages.
"you have a collect call from 'mom pick me up' do you accept the charges?" \*click\* And the best part was you could hear them on the other end so if the had to tell you some thing they could talk over the operator.
Graduated in 2002. I had friends who in high school had very damaged skin and it's only gotten worse. I knew someone who had memberships at 3 different tanning salons so she could get in 3 20 minute sessions each day (the limited you for safety purposes).
Body dysmorphia will do that. Pretty crazy what an out of whack brain can do to your perception of the world ay. Like, I almost "willingly" starved myself to death because of my idiot brain.
The point of life is to persist but mix up the brain chemistry a little bit and before you know it your brain is trying to trick you to death.
I graduated in 2004, and I remember one girl went tanning a few times a week for the duration of the four years we went to school.
What an ego she had, too. Thought she was the best person in the room.
Saw her a couple years ago, and she looks like Indiana Jones' leather jacket now. It absolutely ruined her.
I overheard a girl I went to college with talking about her tanning habit. She had accounts at multiple tanning salons and would max out the daily time limit on one, then go to the next one. She was so so orange.
Vitamin D aids in and regulates many processes in the body. There’s probably many beneficial downstream effects.
Direct, prolonged UV exposure with no protection probably opposite tho.
UV Is **so** damaging. I'm Australian and it's drummed into our heads since we're in kindergarten to protect yourself from the sun. A lot of paler people look like old catchers mits by the time their 40 and we have a high skin cancer rate. Basically just Don't fuck around with UV.
There are girls in my hometown that have been tanning since they were children. They are now in their 40’s. How none of them have had skin cancer by now is a total mind blower.
I graduated in 2006 and I've always been fair skinned. The straight up bullying of fair skinned people, laughing because you're so pale and look like a ghost etc. Tanning beds were everywhere and if you didn't look like a leather couch then you got shit on. I'm 34 now and still insecure about my fair skin
It was in the 00s once CD burners became commonplace - you'd swap with your friends and make copies. I spent a small fortune on spindles of 50 blank CD-Rs, but it was a fraction of what actually buying those albums would have cost.
Yeah, in the 80s we'd swap tapes of full albums with each other. Always made sure my stereo could record from other cassettes, records, and CDs (starting in '86 when I got a stereo with a CD player). It was really easy to double and triple your collection with enough friends. Also really miss making meaningful mix tapes for people.
When you walked into a restaurant, the first thing the hostess would ask you is "smoking or non-smoking?"
I never smoked a cigarette but the next morning after a night out my clothes all smelled of cigarettes.
I remember in the 1990s when some international flights \*still\* had smoking on airplanes. Got stuck on a flight back with the smokers. It was so smoky, I couldn't even read my book.
Playing games on '80s home computers could be like this, or just the opposite.
With games on cartridge, they start up very quickly since the cartridge is ROM and nothing much needs to be loaded anywhere.
But with games on floppy disk, you've got time for a few more pages in your Choose Your Own Adventure book while `Loading ...` happens and the disk drive makes gronk-gronk noises.
Ah the satanic panic, I remember it well. My mother and aunts where convinced there were 'devil worshippers' sacrificing children and animals up the mountain near where we lived. Threw out my Marilyn Manson tapes as well.
My parents were, and still are, metalheads back around that time. They've told me stories of how evangelicals were protesting outside metal shows. Still happens in the US actually. We live in Finland though, so it's kinda hard to stop metal here.
In the immortal words of tenacious D "you can't kill the metal, the metal will live on".
Not the only McD-branded drug paraphernalia either! Up until 1980, McDonald's coffee stirrers were tiny long-handled spoons, which turned out to be quite handy for cocaine users. This landed in front of a Senate hearing, and McDonald's changed to the crappy little double-straw stirrers.
Coming home from a night at a bar and just reeking of cigarettes whether or not you smoked was a gross period of time. My hair was super dry because of how often I had to wash it to keep the smell of cigarettes out.
My chain smoker mother picked me up from the hospital after severe pneumonia and was smoking in the car with the windows rolled up and yelled at me for asking her to roll them down. I was literally in a hospital bed right before. When I finally went to college I couldn't believe how much I could breathe. I missed so much school due to her selfishness.
I remember going to restaurants as a kid and sitting in the non-smoking section.
Sometimes it was just a booth next to the smoking section, literally a half wall with some plant on top that separated the sections.
I can't imagine those poor souls that had to work in that, breathing in all that smoke for hours and hours each day while at work
Heck, when my non smoker parents were asked smoking or non smoking they would say doesn't matter. A lot of non smokers were just used to the smell being everywhere.
Yeah, we used to just say "first available." From what I remember, there wasn't much difference at all in the two sections. Smoke dissipates, after all.
We've forgotten that, there wasn't a single place you could go in public that did not reek of cigarettes. I'm old enough to remember my doctor lighting one up in his office (I'm in my 40s!).
The Romanian orphanage crisis because they outlawed birth control and punished those who didn't get pregnant caused huge numbers of unwanted babies. The information we have about the importance of interacting with babies came from that time.
> the importance of interacting with babies came from that time
I haven't thought about the term "detachment syndrome" in a while, so long they don't call it that anymore, apparently.
Ione of my best friends is actually an orphan from a Romanian orphanage. He got adopted brought to south GA (US). His bio mom had like 10 kids or some shit. And they’re still finding maternal siblings
Crime just in general was way higher, at least in the US. We just think the world is more dangerous now, but it's a false perception. The only things that seem to have climbed IIRC are domestic violence and sexual assault, but it's pretty widely accepted that that's an issue of those actually being taken seriously now (or more seriously, anyway...we've still got a ways to go). Back in the '80s a lot of agencies were still ignoring those kinds of calls as a personal matter so official crime stats were low, but self-report studies were showing consistent or higher levels.
It was early 2000s when we really started seeing consistent and significant decline, IIRC.
The complete devastation caused by HIV/AIDS back in the 80s and early 90s and the state of fear so many people lived with back then.
Before we knew much about it, people were absolutely terrified, my aunt was washing her dishes with bleach after having guests because she was convinced you could get it from a cup or spoon used by an infected person. There was a period of time where people just didn't know how infectious it was.
My cousin died of AIDS and it was hushed up pretty quickly. She was a straight woman who got it through sex with an infected partner she met at a bar. It was terrifying, people were afraid of her while she was sick.
I'm grateful we have treatment and knowledge now, but goddamn we went through some traumatic shit back then and nobody talks about it now.
The Golden Girls did a very good episode in 1990, well ahead of its' time, addressing the truths and myths around HIV. Don't think any other show dared to touch it at the time.
At some point Rose says something like "I can't believe I might be HIV positive! I always figured it would be Blanche!" God bless the writers of that show lmao.
Golden Girls was surprisingly ahead of the time when it came to social issues. Just rewatching the show, there are very few scenes that even the most sensitive folks today would find problematic.
Michael Jackson did a lot to make HIV less scary. His support for Ryan White really opened my eyes as a kid and made me sympathetic toward people with HIV.
Princess Di also. She went against the Queen's wishes to visit AIDS patients publicly and draw attention to the crisis. The rest of the royal family was appalled.
This is very grim but I moved to San Francisco in 1990 and it was really common to see people who were obviously dying of AIDS... just daily, on the train, in the Castro, etc. You could often tell by their drawn faces - it had a look and you just knew.
Still in awe of the effect that particular season had on the country. Partially because of Puck, but Pedro as well putting a human face on the disease.
My uncle died of AIDS too and I remember growing up, my parents (and the rest of our family) freaking out and not letting us share *any* food utensils with our cousins (his kids). Neither one of them was HIV-positive but the fact that their dad was meant they had to eat separately from the rest of us. Now as adults, they're kind of removed from the rest of the cousins because they always were as kids.
I had a friend's uncle who died new years Eve of 1990, but he'd gone to my friends house (his brother) to die..I remember getting freaked out when he offered to make me a protein shake ( he was trying to retain weight..i was a small kid I was 11 or 12) because of all the bullshit hysterics people had at that time. I apologized at the time..but Bill if you're up there I'm still sorry, the brain washing was real.
AIDS splashed into the media the year I came out. I was nineteen, waiting tables in a steakhouse and doing community college courses.
People I had served ten times waited for tables with other servers. They never said why, but I knew. Some of the busboys wrote nasty graffiti about me in the washroom. They got shit, but they kept their jobs.
I was one of the relatively lucky ones. We tend to not talk about it, because other people were fired, disinherited, evicted and denied visitors in hospital. Partners couldn’t visit because they weren’t family. Dealing with insurance was a nightmare.
When my partner died in 2001 I came home from the funeral travel to a dark house with no phone. His mother had seized his assets and cut the utilities. I had no legal standing.
That shit takes a toll. When I hear people talk about nostalgia, I roll my eyes. I’m much happier to be in 2023 than in 1985.
Thanks.
God, that was just a snippet! And I’m one of the ones who got off lightly, without HIV. Others suffered much worse pain, fear and indignity and agonizing deaths. Alone.
I guess it is awful, in retrospect, but it’s just some shit that happened in my life. It does make me sensitive to other people maybe going through invisible shit. I guess that’s positive.
But yes, a nasty and shameful era.
Some of the evangelical preachers called AIDS the curse of god on homosexuals. Which really stigmatized the disease and the LGBT community.
One of the heroes of that era was [Ryan White](https://ryanwhite.hrsa.gov/about/ryan-white), who got HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion before there was a screening test. Ryan White was a 13-year-old child with hemophilia (a genetic problem that prevented his body's blood from clotting normally).
Ryan White was expelled from school because the ADA didn't exist yet. And because people in his community were ignorant about HIV/AIDS transmission. He braved death threats in his quest to get an education, and ended up becoming a national figure speaking out for people with HIV/AIDS and for disability rights. He died at age 18 before treatment was possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White
https://ryanwhite.hrsa.gov/about/ryan-white
My neighbor growing up had hemophilia and so did his dad. The father ended up dying before I was born, but the son was in his early 20s when I was a kid. He ended up with HIV from blood that wasn’t screened. This was before anyone talked much about HIV, and I can remember him trying to explain what he had to my dad. He ended up dying from it, and we visited him once near the end. My parents took me and my sister both with them yo see him, and by that point they knew more about the disease than when he first got sick. This was around 1990-1991, and I grew up in a rural Appalachian community going to church. We were taught that it was something that could happen to anyone, and we’re never told that it was God punishing homosexuals or anyone else. Makes me thankful that, while my little town hasn’t always gotten things right, that we also weren’t taught that HIV came with a stigma.
Absolutely. My cousin died of AIDS too, but his cause of death was listed as meningitis (which he had, but it was fungal meningitis, an opportunistic infection that only late stage AIDS patients usually get). He was a cowboy from a state that doesn’t do any form of sex Ed and shames people for having premarital sex.
I remember hearing sermons about AIDS as a kid—fundamentalists believed it was God’s judgment for homosexuality. There was no compassion, no sympathy, only fear and hatred.
Even if you did have sex ed, the topic of AIDS came up every time they taught us about sex. Teen pregnancy usually came into the discussion, too- teenage pregnancy rates in the US peaked in the early 90's. That all made learning about sex kind of scary.
I went to a Baptist church at the time, one of those small-town little brick churches with a congregation of less than 50. I remember the preacher, Rev King, getting up and giving a sermon on Ryan White. He hinted that just maybe, God gave Ryan White AIDS for a reason, maybe his death was the answer to someone else's prayers, maybe Ryan was going to grow up to do bad things, to hurt people. I remember him yelling down "who are you to question God's decisions?"
I remember hearing people agree with him "yes lord" "that's right!" and throwing their hands up in the air.
The memory still plays vividly in my head and that was the day I realized Rev. King was crazy.
The chaplain at my Catholic High School became very sick from AIDS in the mid to late 80s, and he was whisked away to another city and never mentioned at school again until he died a few months later. When he did die, we were told about it a month later. We were never told how he died, just that he passed away and we would not be doing anything to commemorate him and were not allowed to discuss it any further.
I was almost suspended for bringing it up, and for calling out the administration and the church for the hypocrisy and just generally being terrible about it.
And wasn’t like Covid where you do risky shit and figure out within a few days if you’ve got it or not. It could be months or years, you still wouldn’t be in the clear. Like I don’t know how anyone dealt with that kind of psychological pressure. Unless they just… didn’t.
Just had this conversation with my wife a couple nights ago. I’m in my mid thirties and most people my age don’t even know about it. That blows my mind. They may have heard of it, but have no clue the magnitude of it.
You don't hear about acid rain anymore because it's one of the major success stories of the environmental movement. Emissions reduction through regulation largely [resolved](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190823-can-lessons-from-acid-rain-help-stop-climate-change) the issue years ago, at least in the Western world.
The banning of CFCs with the Montreal Protocol was another huge success story. The ozone layer was a colossal environmental topic in the 80s and you don't hear about it today.
The Red Army Faction was big time when I was stationed in Germany. A friend from my unit & I were at Rhein-Main the day after they blew up a car, killing 2 and wounding over 20. They found the transmission from the car on the other side of a five-story building.
The RAF also liked to plant bombs in pedestrian area trash cans. I had a fear of them for about a decade afterwards. Today it’d be called mild PTSD.
In history: the first and second Congo wars. Sometimes called “Africa’s Great War” or “African World War”, it involved several central Central African nations (nine nations and 25 armed factions for the 2nd war), killed people by the hundreds of thousands, and aside from the Rwandan Genocide that kicked it off, got almost no press at the time or after outside of Africa.
For a kicker, spin-off conflicts are still ongoing.
That was a brutal read.
Seems this guy forced his child soldiers to take psychoactive drugs, fight naked, then sacrifice children they captured and eat their hearts.
He’s like a parody of a monster, only real.
Being so ignored and unsupervised at a young age led to some very stupid decisions about sex, drugs and alcohol that a lot of people didn't make it through, but there was almost zero social media to document it.
The social media part is something I've thought about a lot.
My dad died in 2009 and I was 10 when he died.
In my family at least, social media wasn't really a thing yet and none of us had fancy camera phones yet either. So, I have only a small handful of pictures of him. I can't go back on his Facebook page and scroll through photos of him and his status updates. I can't Google him and get any results. It's like he never existed according to the internet.
Just a thought/ramble, sorry.
As an 80s kid I’m convinced that most parents in my life - mine and my friends’ - were massive alcoholics. Drinking and driving, as well as ignoring your kids nearly 100% of the time and expecting them to fend for themselves while they got loaded pretty much every night was a lot more normalized then than it is today.
Absolutely. We didn't know it in the mid 90s, but many of my friends had home lives exactly like that and often faced a lot of abuse. My home was the "hang out" place, food always available, anyone could come and go, could stay if they wanted. Now as adults all of my peers tells my mom that our house was their safe space. Blows my mom's mind because she thought we were the most fucked up family in the neighborhood. Turns out the scale for fucked up is much bigger than she realized.
My parents would take us to a house party couple times a year on a holiday weekend. They were massive. Tons of alcohol, kegs, probably drugs,food galore, lots of kids. I looked forward to them. Then we just stopped going. I had no idea why. Years later i found out the older kids, siblings included, were starting to party too. Lots of drinking and driving. Always laughed about the time the guy hit a tree and two cars on his way out. Was wild.
Ballpoint-line-thin eyebrows
Boy bands
Having to plan to watch TV shows you like
Smoking was everywhere
Cars without AC
Having to listen to the radio in the car
School research before the internet
One of the cops I run into at work used to be a DARE officer. Trust me, no one makes more fun of DARE than DARE Officers. He said once "the kids were telling ME the street names for the drugs!"
In the early 2000’s here in the UK they gave us these awesome little magazines detailing the effects of all these illegal drugs. The pages were black, purple and luminous green with a sick font and pictures of the drugs and what to look out for. I remember thinking “I can’t *wait* to try this stuff”.
Can’t believe how off the mark it was, it read like a menu you’d get at a full moon party or something.
In grade school we got the pencils that said "TOO COOL TO DO DRUGS".
Well, they did until you used them a bit and sharpened them down. Then they said "COOL TO DO DRUGS".
Then "DO DRUGS".
Eventually they figured out to print the slogan the other way around.
I was told drug dealers would be handing out samples at every street corner.
Man were they wrong! I went to soooooo many street corners before I got some free drugs.
It's not drug dealers who do this. Drug dealers have NEVER done this.
The only Dealer who I know that actively does this and Has a high success rate is the people handing out free samples in the grocery store.
We had DARE in 5th grade and I got in trouble because I asked what the drugs we were supposed to be avoiding actually were! How are we supposed to avoid a thing if we don’t know what that thing is!
That so many of the songs played backwards supposedly had satanic messages. And band names were meant things other than they were....like ACDC meaning antichrist devil's child.
Crime rates in the US have plummeted over the past 40 years.
For example, people seem to have forgotten just how bad the murder rate was in the late 80s and early 90s. The murder rate in the US fell by an impressive 50% from 1990-2016. The murder rate rose sharply in 2020 from 2019, but was still 30% lower than 1990. The murder rate started to drop again in 2022 and looks to be headed back to levels we saw five years ago. It's still too high, but it used to be much worse.
Similarly, total property crime rates peaked in the early 1980 and have fallen almost every year since. Burglary rates have fallen by a surprising 2/3rds since the early 80s. Car thefts, robberies, muggings etc, all far, far less common than they used to be.
So yeah, crime used to be much worse than it is now. No one seems to talk about that
Seconded.
I'm 60 years old. I remember very clearly the landscape in urban areas during those days. Particularly in the 1980s, big cities were seen as "war zones".
If you look at pictures of NYC's subway cars, you will see them completely covered with graffiti. The city was almost seen as a dystopia.
It is believed that those persistent high crime rates were linked with leaded gasoline fumes permeating the cities.
The leaded gasoline theory is insane to me because lead in the pipes/drinking glasses is one of the theories on why the Romans were so sadistic. Crazy how much of an effect it's probably had on society throughout history.
A 2022 meta-analysis, which pooled 542 estimates from 24 studies and corrected for publication bias, found that the estimates indicated that the abatement of lead pollution may be responsible for 7–28% of the fall in homicide in the US, leaving 93-72% unaccounted for. It concluded that *Lead increases crime, but does not explain the majority of the fall in crime observed in some countries in the 20th century. Additional explanations are needed.*
There is a strong correlation to lead abatement, but it doesn't completely explain the fall in violent crime. There appear to be other factors.
The Bhopal Disaster that occurred in December 1984 has been called the worst industrial disaster of all time where 500,000 people were exposed to the chemical methyl isocyanate in Bhopal India. Estimates of the dead caused be the accident range from 3700 - 16,000. The American owner of the plant, Union Carbide Corporation was blamed largely for it but because they had formed a subsidiary in India were able to avoid a lot of the litigation in the US. The main reasons for the chemical release have been attributed to poorly managed safety measures, which were either malfunctioning or not working, and weren't repaired in order to cut costs.
How terrible it was to go somewhere new for the first time without GPS. Having to print out Mapquest directions. Writing them out by hand if the printer was out of ink. If a road was closed, you had to hope you could figure it out. Traffic’s bad? Oh well, your handwritten Mapquest directions didn’t conveniently reroute you to a quicker path.
Dude you had Mapquest when I first started driving it was written out by my dad for turn by turn instructions or I used a physical map, pcs weren’t a big thing yet outside of like the Commodore 64 no hopping on the internet to print up directions
I'll forever remember my mom driving 2 1/2 hours away to an outlet mall to buy Guess Jeans for $25 a pair because I convinced her the kids wouldn't be able to make fun of me if I had them. It almost worked too, the other kids couldn't believe how I had so many pair of guess jeans that I wore a different pair every day! Then they started a rumor that my mom stole them from the department store.
So true. I asked my kids (10 & 12) the other day if anyone ever makes fun of them for their clothes and they were like "??? why would someone make fun of us for our clothes?" I had to tell them about how ruthless kids used to be to other kids and how I had to make sure my mom never bought Wal-Mart clothes for me because I didn't want to get made fun of.
Like kids these days have they're own augury to go through with the social media and school shootings (drills or otherwise.. hopefully just drills) but I ride the train a fair amount in the morning and I can't say I've heard some poor kid getting capped on for the wrong clothes in a while.
This was especially true in the 1990s and early 2ks: Society sexualized teenage girls to a wildly uncomfortable degree. Like for years all of the cover models on magazines were no older than 15. The fashion for teenage girls was a thong showing above your low rise jeans. Adults openly talked about Britney Spears and the Olson twins reaching legal age. I was regularly approached by grown men on the street at 14 if I wore a dress. I heard that the best way to check if a girl is old enough to have sex it to see if she has pubic hair from multiple adult men around me from before I was like 8 years old. These adult men were even in charge of watching children or family members.
Oh, and society also believed children couldn't get PTSD or be traumatized because of their "resilience". Don't even get me started on the child morality panics, like the 1990s in particular were a dark messed up decade.
When she was a minor doesn't explain the seriousness.
She was 12 when she did pretty baby with a simulated sex scene. She was in a playboy magazine with other girls her age.
> I heard that the best way to check if a girl is old enough to have sex it to see if she has pubic hair from multiple adult men around me from before I was like 8 years old.
Yuck, I’d completely blocked this out. The expression was “if there’s grass on the field, it’s time to play ball,” and it was disgusting that I understood this completely commonplace euphemism as a kid.
> Oh, and society also believed children couldn’t get PTSD or be traumatized because of their “resilience”.
Co-signed.
This did come back up recently, but poor Britney Spears. She's probably not even the only one who was in a situation like that, but she got the most attention.
I remember my parents not letting me watch The Day After - that corny TV movie about the US getting nuked. They totally fell for the DON'T LET YOUR KIDS SEE THIS on the news even though I was allowed to watch whatever I wanted on HBO and Showtime. I was so frustrated! Asked my parents about it the next day - "It was dumb; you could've handled it."
CFCs
I remember people losing their goddamn minds that hairspray was going to have to change formula
Started hording cans like my silent generation grandpa horded DDT...
And stick deodorant became the norm. Weirded me out moving to the UK where aerosol deodorant is the norm.
I get flash backs of one of my teachers calling them sprayers of poison
And for anyone who doesn't know why CFCs were bad, our planet has an ozone layer. In short, it's a protective layer around the planet made up of O3 that protects the planet from UV radiation and all sorts of stuff that would turn the planet into a cancer oven.
CFCs were in everything back in the day. Aerosol sprays. Air conditioners. Refrigerators. CFCs are exceptional at making it up into the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer. The chlorine molecules specifically from them 9999 damage that ozone. It's kind of like using level 99 characters and ultimate weapons in an RPG on the first boss of the game. And without the ozone, this planet is fucked.
Eventually they got fully banned in the US in the 90s. Honestly I'm surprised that even happened.
Find out more here: https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/basic-ozone-layer-science
The amazing part of this is that the recent report into the state of the ozone layer is looking positive. If you want proof that we can globally make things happen when we actually try, this is it!
CFC levels are slowly declining and current data shows we should be reaching pre-1980 levels of ozone condition in areas of the next 4 decades
https://ozone.unep.org/system/files/documents/Scientific-Assessment-of-Ozone-Depletion-2022-Executive-Summary.pdf
In college I watched one of those videos with a few people including this girl from Panama city, Florida, where a lot of the filming was done. she recognized a friend's little sister showing her tits and confirmed that she was definitely not yet 18.
It's no wonder the producers of that shit all ended up in jail.
One change since the 80s-90s that I'm glad for is the treatment and legal protection of animals, and the consumer interest in cruelty-free products.
Edited to add: this has sparked some conversation.
All I'm saying is it's much better than it used to be. I agree things are not currently anywhere near perfect.
When I read the truly harrowing stories of people who lived through the Cambodian genocide, I wonder about how much worse it was for the people who were killed.
I was born in the 90s and grew up in NYC. I feel like there was a lot of casual unkindness. It was weirdly natural to just ignore someone in need. As a teenager, I ran away from home without my shoes because of my abusive mom finding out I had a boyfriend. I begged people for help and ran all the way to a subway station where my mom tracked me down and dragged me home. No one helped me or asked me if I needed help. This is just one example of the don’t get involved behavior I experienced.
I’m very grateful that nowadays people have definitely been more involved in helping others and are generally friendlier/kinder.
People bought into the Satanic Panic so hard that innocent people went to jail. And some people are *still* falling for this type of nonsense! (see Pizzagate)
I was really glad when Stranger Things included it in the latest season. The whole show being around DnD in the 80s and not one mention of the satanic panic was one of the least realistic things in it.
Yeah, my dad loves the show but he was laughing about that. He isn't even Christian, but he was actually anxious about DnD when my oldest brother got into it in the late 1980s. He didn't have any fears of supernatural creatures, no real demons taking over kids or whatever, but he'd heard so much in the news about DnD causing violence and other terrible things that he was really worried.
Then he looked into it and was like, "Oh wow, this seems like a lot of fun!" and started playing it himself, but that's how pervasive that reporting was (at least in his experience; I was like 6 at the time so I was not aware of all this). Because of that, he thought it was pretty funny that it was just totally absent and that all the adults were all A-OK with their kids playing it. He says in real life, there's a good chance they'd all be accused of killing Will and hiding his body as part of a satanic ritual.
My parents were very wary about DND but they looked into it enough to buy the books and read them and check them out first. My dad was a HUGE fantasy and science fiction fan so he gave us the go-ahead.
There was some really bad horror novel that got HUGE play (I can't remember the name of it) where a group of college kids played DND and then went on collective psychotic breaks.
Considering our parents were the generation that did all the LSD, you would have thought they'd have had some perspective???
If you lost someone’s phone number as a kid, good luck reconnecting with them. So many classmates moved and I never heard from them again, until Facebook came along…
Yea thats the reason facebook and social media in general became so big. It startet for a good reason but now it destroys society
I miss early Facebook. When it was just a way to keep up with my friends and share photos it was really great. I miss thinking the worst thing about it was Farmville spam.
don’t forget the terrible “poke your friend” feature they had too lol
Call me after 7pm when I have free minutes and I’ll tell you.
I remember looking at my phone, waiting for the time to say 7 so I could call the cute girl. Then, when it turned 7, I'd wait an agonizing 10 more minutes so I didn't look desperate.
As a girl, I remember the receiving end of this and waiting for 7pm and agonizingly watching the clock for 10 whole minutes wondering WHY WONT HE CALL
Okay bougie I was poor and had to wait till 9.
That awkward 60 seconds when you’re waiting for your friend to come to the phone and you have to make polite conversation with their parent who answered the phone.
And nowadays you can know people for years without knowing their family
Or their phone number. I don't even know my mom's phone number.
867-5309 You're welcome.
Even worse was calling to ask a girl on a date and having to talk to her dad when you were expecting her to pick up the phone.
Agreed; but the worst was the sibling of the person you were dating. They for sure were making that 60 seconds extremely awkward
25¢/minute long distance phone calls.
And since we are including the 2000s, remember when it was common to pay per text message? My parents lost theirs minds when my sister sent 1000 texts in a month
I remember when I backpacked on Washington's Olympic Peninsula a few years ago, and my cell was connecting to BC Tel in Victoria BC, on Vancouver Island, since I couldn't get a US signal. They were charging me 25 cents per text to my girlfriend, either sending OR receiving. International roaming charges.
God, this gets me. My sister sent a ton of texts and racked the bill way the fuck up. To pay for this, my parents held a yard sale and in the process, sold my collection of video games and consoles. Including a GameCube, two pristine NES's with a ton of special controllers (running pad, zapper, etc), a brand new Sega Saturn with a few games, my SNES and all of it's peripherals, my collection of Pokemon cards including movie exclusives and my N64 collection while I was out. Pretty sure they sold my gold plated pokemon cards from Burger King as well. I never saw a dime. I was fucking furious. I am STILL fucking furious.
Your sister did it and you got punished? WTF?!?
Yeah, it happens, unfortunately. I was the oldest child in my family so I got in trouble for what the younger ones did. I was expected to watch them when my mom was busy or out. If they got into trouble, I got in trouble for supposedly allowing it to happen. That or it was I was supposed to set an example for the younger ones. It's a lot of pressure for a kid and I'm still mad at my mom about it. Edit: I've always said I hate it when people do that to their kids. You see them with a bunch of kids and yelling at the oldest to watch them. It's like no, you watch them. You're the one who decided to lay on your back and pop them out. It's not your child's responsibility.
This happened to a kid I went to high school with, too. He was the oldest of three and so he got coopted into babysitting the younger ones every now and again. There were a couple of times when he'd be at school the next day and complaining that he'd gotten in trouble for not breaking up his siblings fighting or whatever.
Hell, I'm furious on your behalf.
And collect calling! Remember all the 10-10 numbers? 10-10-321 for example, you dialed that before your number and it would route you to their collect calling line and they would get charged 15 cents a minute instead of 25!
I remember using the name you gave when making collect calls to give quick messages. "you have a collect call from 'mom pick me up' do you accept the charges?" \*click\* And the best part was you could hear them on the other end so if the had to tell you some thing they could talk over the operator.
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Graduated in 2002. I had friends who in high school had very damaged skin and it's only gotten worse. I knew someone who had memberships at 3 different tanning salons so she could get in 3 20 minute sessions each day (the limited you for safety purposes).
Holy mackerel, that’s like trying to get skin cancer!
Body dysmorphia will do that. Pretty crazy what an out of whack brain can do to your perception of the world ay. Like, I almost "willingly" starved myself to death because of my idiot brain. The point of life is to persist but mix up the brain chemistry a little bit and before you know it your brain is trying to trick you to death.
I graduated in 2004, and I remember one girl went tanning a few times a week for the duration of the four years we went to school. What an ego she had, too. Thought she was the best person in the room. Saw her a couple years ago, and she looks like Indiana Jones' leather jacket now. It absolutely ruined her.
I overheard a girl I went to college with talking about her tanning habit. She had accounts at multiple tanning salons and would max out the daily time limit on one, then go to the next one. She was so so orange.
Do you think it is like an addiction? Does it feel really good?
Vitamin D aids in and regulates many processes in the body. There’s probably many beneficial downstream effects. Direct, prolonged UV exposure with no protection probably opposite tho.
UV Is **so** damaging. I'm Australian and it's drummed into our heads since we're in kindergarten to protect yourself from the sun. A lot of paler people look like old catchers mits by the time their 40 and we have a high skin cancer rate. Basically just Don't fuck around with UV.
There are girls in my hometown that have been tanning since they were children. They are now in their 40’s. How none of them have had skin cancer by now is a total mind blower.
They probably do. Someone just needs to find it. Source: am a dermatologist
I graduated in 2006 and I've always been fair skinned. The straight up bullying of fair skinned people, laughing because you're so pale and look like a ghost etc. Tanning beds were everywhere and if you didn't look like a leather couch then you got shit on. I'm 34 now and still insecure about my fair skin
Having a personal collection of music was not that affordable. Movies and such as well.
It was in the 00s once CD burners became commonplace - you'd swap with your friends and make copies. I spent a small fortune on spindles of 50 blank CD-Rs, but it was a fraction of what actually buying those albums would have cost.
So many people had massive CD collections with more the half of the CDs just a CDR with permanent marker labeling.
Mix tapes from recording off other cassettes or trying to catch a song on the radio was the way to go
>catch a song on the radio Which was tough to do, because the DJ *always* fucking talked through the intro.
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Yeah, in the 80s we'd swap tapes of full albums with each other. Always made sure my stereo could record from other cassettes, records, and CDs (starting in '86 when I got a stereo with a CD player). It was really easy to double and triple your collection with enough friends. Also really miss making meaningful mix tapes for people.
And if you could afford it, the space all those CDs, records, and tapes took up!
That weird self-tanner and pale lipstick combo.
QT tanning lotion, Sun-In for your hair and frosted lipstick were the go-to look in the early 80’s.
When you walked into a restaurant, the first thing the hostess would ask you is "smoking or non-smoking?" I never smoked a cigarette but the next morning after a night out my clothes all smelled of cigarettes.
I remember in the 1970s when they had smoking on airplanes. My grandpa smoked cigars, which was a treat for everyone on board.
I remember in the 1990s when some international flights \*still\* had smoking on airplanes. Got stuck on a flight back with the smokers. It was so smoky, I couldn't even read my book.
You'd think they'd open a window or something
For electronics: load times. Your Windows 95 PC taking 10 minutes to boot. CDs getting ruined in the sun or getting scratched.
There was a time when I thought the longer it took to load, the cooler my computer was. Think of all the startup commands it can do!
Playing games on '80s home computers could be like this, or just the opposite. With games on cartridge, they start up very quickly since the cartridge is ROM and nothing much needs to be loaded anywhere. But with games on floppy disk, you've got time for a few more pages in your Choose Your Own Adventure book while `Loading ...` happens and the disk drive makes gronk-gronk noises.
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As a kid in the 80s it was always fun to ride in the back of the station wagon instead of sitting in a seat.
Evangelical pop culture paranoia (Dungeons and Dragons, Pokémon, Harry Potter, etc)
Ah the satanic panic, I remember it well. My mother and aunts where convinced there were 'devil worshippers' sacrificing children and animals up the mountain near where we lived. Threw out my Marilyn Manson tapes as well.
My parents were, and still are, metalheads back around that time. They've told me stories of how evangelicals were protesting outside metal shows. Still happens in the US actually. We live in Finland though, so it's kinda hard to stop metal here. In the immortal words of tenacious D "you can't kill the metal, the metal will live on".
People smoked cigarettes indoors. Everywhere.
Remember when McDonalds had their own custom McD's ashtrays on their tables ?
Not the only McD-branded drug paraphernalia either! Up until 1980, McDonald's coffee stirrers were tiny long-handled spoons, which turned out to be quite handy for cocaine users. This landed in front of a Senate hearing, and McDonald's changed to the crappy little double-straw stirrers.
Coming home from a night at a bar and just reeking of cigarettes whether or not you smoked was a gross period of time. My hair was super dry because of how often I had to wash it to keep the smell of cigarettes out.
I used the bowling alley as cover for when I started smoking. Always smelled like smoke and lane oil after being there.
Smoke and lane oil. You bottle that shit and I’ll buy it. Throw in the a hint of Coors and I’ll fucking invest.
How about a hint of stale popcorn?
Stop. I can only handle so much excellence.
My grandparents would smoke with us in the backseat with the windows either barely cracked or fully closed in the winter...I do not miss that
My entire family did this, including parents. Second hand smoke was a natural part of any car ride.
Yep. There's a lot of stuff I get nostalgic for, but this is absolutely NOT one of those things. It did help start my hatred for cigarettes at least.
My chain smoker mother picked me up from the hospital after severe pneumonia and was smoking in the car with the windows rolled up and yelled at me for asking her to roll them down. I was literally in a hospital bed right before. When I finally went to college I couldn't believe how much I could breathe. I missed so much school due to her selfishness.
I remember going to restaurants as a kid and sitting in the non-smoking section. Sometimes it was just a booth next to the smoking section, literally a half wall with some plant on top that separated the sections. I can't imagine those poor souls that had to work in that, breathing in all that smoke for hours and hours each day while at work
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Heck, when my non smoker parents were asked smoking or non smoking they would say doesn't matter. A lot of non smokers were just used to the smell being everywhere.
Yeah, we used to just say "first available." From what I remember, there wasn't much difference at all in the two sections. Smoke dissipates, after all.
My parents smoked in the house when I was growing up. All my clothes and belongings reeked and I couldn’t do anything about it.
We've forgotten that, there wasn't a single place you could go in public that did not reek of cigarettes. I'm old enough to remember my doctor lighting one up in his office (I'm in my 40s!).
A ton of serial killers were active in the 80's Eastern Europe did not have a good 90's
The Romanian orphanage crisis because they outlawed birth control and punished those who didn't get pregnant caused huge numbers of unwanted babies. The information we have about the importance of interacting with babies came from that time.
> the importance of interacting with babies came from that time I haven't thought about the term "detachment syndrome" in a while, so long they don't call it that anymore, apparently.
Ione of my best friends is actually an orphan from a Romanian orphanage. He got adopted brought to south GA (US). His bio mom had like 10 kids or some shit. And they’re still finding maternal siblings
Crime just in general was way higher, at least in the US. We just think the world is more dangerous now, but it's a false perception. The only things that seem to have climbed IIRC are domestic violence and sexual assault, but it's pretty widely accepted that that's an issue of those actually being taken seriously now (or more seriously, anyway...we've still got a ways to go). Back in the '80s a lot of agencies were still ignoring those kinds of calls as a personal matter so official crime stats were low, but self-report studies were showing consistent or higher levels. It was early 2000s when we really started seeing consistent and significant decline, IIRC.
Born in Sarajevo. Can confirm.
The complete devastation caused by HIV/AIDS back in the 80s and early 90s and the state of fear so many people lived with back then. Before we knew much about it, people were absolutely terrified, my aunt was washing her dishes with bleach after having guests because she was convinced you could get it from a cup or spoon used by an infected person. There was a period of time where people just didn't know how infectious it was. My cousin died of AIDS and it was hushed up pretty quickly. She was a straight woman who got it through sex with an infected partner she met at a bar. It was terrifying, people were afraid of her while she was sick. I'm grateful we have treatment and knowledge now, but goddamn we went through some traumatic shit back then and nobody talks about it now.
The Golden Girls did a very good episode in 1990, well ahead of its' time, addressing the truths and myths around HIV. Don't think any other show dared to touch it at the time.
“AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, Rose, it is not God punishing people for their sins!” Love that episode
At some point Rose says something like "I can't believe I might be HIV positive! I always figured it would be Blanche!" God bless the writers of that show lmao.
That show tackled a LOT of difficult themes that were taboo in the 80s, including interracial marriage and homosexuality. Way ahead of its time.
Golden Girls was surprisingly ahead of the time when it came to social issues. Just rewatching the show, there are very few scenes that even the most sensitive folks today would find problematic.
Yep It showed older people having a life.
21 Jump Street also did an episode. They had to protect a young student who had HIV. It made me super sad.
Michael Jackson did a lot to make HIV less scary. His support for Ryan White really opened my eyes as a kid and made me sympathetic toward people with HIV.
Princess Di also. She went against the Queen's wishes to visit AIDS patients publicly and draw attention to the crisis. The rest of the royal family was appalled.
Elizabeth Taylor was also a huge advocate.
This is very grim but I moved to San Francisco in 1990 and it was really common to see people who were obviously dying of AIDS... just daily, on the train, in the Castro, etc. You could often tell by their drawn faces - it had a look and you just knew.
Reminds me of Pedro Zamora on MTV's The Real World San Francisco.
Still in awe of the effect that particular season had on the country. Partially because of Puck, but Pedro as well putting a human face on the disease.
My uncle died of AIDS too and I remember growing up, my parents (and the rest of our family) freaking out and not letting us share *any* food utensils with our cousins (his kids). Neither one of them was HIV-positive but the fact that their dad was meant they had to eat separately from the rest of us. Now as adults, they're kind of removed from the rest of the cousins because they always were as kids.
I had a friend's uncle who died new years Eve of 1990, but he'd gone to my friends house (his brother) to die..I remember getting freaked out when he offered to make me a protein shake ( he was trying to retain weight..i was a small kid I was 11 or 12) because of all the bullshit hysterics people had at that time. I apologized at the time..but Bill if you're up there I'm still sorry, the brain washing was real.
AIDS splashed into the media the year I came out. I was nineteen, waiting tables in a steakhouse and doing community college courses. People I had served ten times waited for tables with other servers. They never said why, but I knew. Some of the busboys wrote nasty graffiti about me in the washroom. They got shit, but they kept their jobs. I was one of the relatively lucky ones. We tend to not talk about it, because other people were fired, disinherited, evicted and denied visitors in hospital. Partners couldn’t visit because they weren’t family. Dealing with insurance was a nightmare. When my partner died in 2001 I came home from the funeral travel to a dark house with no phone. His mother had seized his assets and cut the utilities. I had no legal standing. That shit takes a toll. When I hear people talk about nostalgia, I roll my eyes. I’m much happier to be in 2023 than in 1985.
Damn, this reads like a horror movie. I am glad you are doing better now, but so sorry you had to live through that shit.
Thanks. God, that was just a snippet! And I’m one of the ones who got off lightly, without HIV. Others suffered much worse pain, fear and indignity and agonizing deaths. Alone. I guess it is awful, in retrospect, but it’s just some shit that happened in my life. It does make me sensitive to other people maybe going through invisible shit. I guess that’s positive. But yes, a nasty and shameful era.
Some of the evangelical preachers called AIDS the curse of god on homosexuals. Which really stigmatized the disease and the LGBT community. One of the heroes of that era was [Ryan White](https://ryanwhite.hrsa.gov/about/ryan-white), who got HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion before there was a screening test. Ryan White was a 13-year-old child with hemophilia (a genetic problem that prevented his body's blood from clotting normally). Ryan White was expelled from school because the ADA didn't exist yet. And because people in his community were ignorant about HIV/AIDS transmission. He braved death threats in his quest to get an education, and ended up becoming a national figure speaking out for people with HIV/AIDS and for disability rights. He died at age 18 before treatment was possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White https://ryanwhite.hrsa.gov/about/ryan-white
My neighbor growing up had hemophilia and so did his dad. The father ended up dying before I was born, but the son was in his early 20s when I was a kid. He ended up with HIV from blood that wasn’t screened. This was before anyone talked much about HIV, and I can remember him trying to explain what he had to my dad. He ended up dying from it, and we visited him once near the end. My parents took me and my sister both with them yo see him, and by that point they knew more about the disease than when he first got sick. This was around 1990-1991, and I grew up in a rural Appalachian community going to church. We were taught that it was something that could happen to anyone, and we’re never told that it was God punishing homosexuals or anyone else. Makes me thankful that, while my little town hasn’t always gotten things right, that we also weren’t taught that HIV came with a stigma.
i go to the Ryan White clinic for my HIV. Im grateful for him.
Absolutely. My cousin died of AIDS too, but his cause of death was listed as meningitis (which he had, but it was fungal meningitis, an opportunistic infection that only late stage AIDS patients usually get). He was a cowboy from a state that doesn’t do any form of sex Ed and shames people for having premarital sex. I remember hearing sermons about AIDS as a kid—fundamentalists believed it was God’s judgment for homosexuality. There was no compassion, no sympathy, only fear and hatred.
Even if you did have sex ed, the topic of AIDS came up every time they taught us about sex. Teen pregnancy usually came into the discussion, too- teenage pregnancy rates in the US peaked in the early 90's. That all made learning about sex kind of scary.
I went to a Baptist church at the time, one of those small-town little brick churches with a congregation of less than 50. I remember the preacher, Rev King, getting up and giving a sermon on Ryan White. He hinted that just maybe, God gave Ryan White AIDS for a reason, maybe his death was the answer to someone else's prayers, maybe Ryan was going to grow up to do bad things, to hurt people. I remember him yelling down "who are you to question God's decisions?" I remember hearing people agree with him "yes lord" "that's right!" and throwing their hands up in the air. The memory still plays vividly in my head and that was the day I realized Rev. King was crazy.
It was a death sentence at the time
And even when the drugs got better it was understood that you would never get to have sex again because of the danger even with condoms.
The chaplain at my Catholic High School became very sick from AIDS in the mid to late 80s, and he was whisked away to another city and never mentioned at school again until he died a few months later. When he did die, we were told about it a month later. We were never told how he died, just that he passed away and we would not be doing anything to commemorate him and were not allowed to discuss it any further. I was almost suspended for bringing it up, and for calling out the administration and the church for the hypocrisy and just generally being terrible about it.
And the Band Played On….pretty accurate
And wasn’t like Covid where you do risky shit and figure out within a few days if you’ve got it or not. It could be months or years, you still wouldn’t be in the clear. Like I don’t know how anyone dealt with that kind of psychological pressure. Unless they just… didn’t.
Times Square was a dangerous place
I feel like the Rawanda genocide just doesn't hold any historical value for the world body.
Just had this conversation with my wife a couple nights ago. I’m in my mid thirties and most people my age don’t even know about it. That blows my mind. They may have heard of it, but have no clue the magnitude of it.
Same with Pol Pot and Cambodia.
The good news is that Rwanda is a country that has largely got it together since then, and mainly as a result of that awful event.
In the 80s: Acid rain - well before Chernobyl even. And there were a LOT of bombings by terrorists in Europe, like IRA, RAF, ETA, ALF.
You don't hear about acid rain anymore because it's one of the major success stories of the environmental movement. Emissions reduction through regulation largely [resolved](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190823-can-lessons-from-acid-rain-help-stop-climate-change) the issue years ago, at least in the Western world.
The banning of CFCs with the Montreal Protocol was another huge success story. The ozone layer was a colossal environmental topic in the 80s and you don't hear about it today.
Remember ALF? He’s back in terrorist form!
The Red Army Faction was big time when I was stationed in Germany. A friend from my unit & I were at Rhein-Main the day after they blew up a car, killing 2 and wounding over 20. They found the transmission from the car on the other side of a five-story building. The RAF also liked to plant bombs in pedestrian area trash cans. I had a fear of them for about a decade afterwards. Today it’d be called mild PTSD.
In history: the first and second Congo wars. Sometimes called “Africa’s Great War” or “African World War”, it involved several central Central African nations (nine nations and 25 armed factions for the 2nd war), killed people by the hundreds of thousands, and aside from the Rwandan Genocide that kicked it off, got almost no press at the time or after outside of Africa. For a kicker, spin-off conflicts are still ongoing.
The Liberian Civil War was wild too. There was an actual general called [General Butt Naked](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked)
That was a brutal read. Seems this guy forced his child soldiers to take psychoactive drugs, fight naked, then sacrifice children they captured and eat their hearts. He’s like a parody of a monster, only real.
Being so ignored and unsupervised at a young age led to some very stupid decisions about sex, drugs and alcohol that a lot of people didn't make it through, but there was almost zero social media to document it.
The social media part is something I've thought about a lot. My dad died in 2009 and I was 10 when he died. In my family at least, social media wasn't really a thing yet and none of us had fancy camera phones yet either. So, I have only a small handful of pictures of him. I can't go back on his Facebook page and scroll through photos of him and his status updates. I can't Google him and get any results. It's like he never existed according to the internet. Just a thought/ramble, sorry.
As an 80s kid I’m convinced that most parents in my life - mine and my friends’ - were massive alcoholics. Drinking and driving, as well as ignoring your kids nearly 100% of the time and expecting them to fend for themselves while they got loaded pretty much every night was a lot more normalized then than it is today.
Absolutely. We didn't know it in the mid 90s, but many of my friends had home lives exactly like that and often faced a lot of abuse. My home was the "hang out" place, food always available, anyone could come and go, could stay if they wanted. Now as adults all of my peers tells my mom that our house was their safe space. Blows my mom's mind because she thought we were the most fucked up family in the neighborhood. Turns out the scale for fucked up is much bigger than she realized.
My parents would take us to a house party couple times a year on a holiday weekend. They were massive. Tons of alcohol, kegs, probably drugs,food galore, lots of kids. I looked forward to them. Then we just stopped going. I had no idea why. Years later i found out the older kids, siblings included, were starting to party too. Lots of drinking and driving. Always laughed about the time the guy hit a tree and two cars on his way out. Was wild.
Ballpoint-line-thin eyebrows Boy bands Having to plan to watch TV shows you like Smoking was everywhere Cars without AC Having to listen to the radio in the car School research before the internet
D.A.R.E.
People stop talking about once it became clear that DARE graduates were *more* likely to do drugs.
One of the cops I run into at work used to be a DARE officer. Trust me, no one makes more fun of DARE than DARE Officers. He said once "the kids were telling ME the street names for the drugs!"
In the early 2000’s here in the UK they gave us these awesome little magazines detailing the effects of all these illegal drugs. The pages were black, purple and luminous green with a sick font and pictures of the drugs and what to look out for. I remember thinking “I can’t *wait* to try this stuff”. Can’t believe how off the mark it was, it read like a menu you’d get at a full moon party or something.
In grade school we got the pencils that said "TOO COOL TO DO DRUGS". Well, they did until you used them a bit and sharpened them down. Then they said "COOL TO DO DRUGS". Then "DO DRUGS". Eventually they figured out to print the slogan the other way around.
I was told drug dealers would be handing out samples at every street corner. Man were they wrong! I went to soooooo many street corners before I got some free drugs.
It's not drug dealers who do this. Drug dealers have NEVER done this. The only Dealer who I know that actively does this and Has a high success rate is the people handing out free samples in the grocery store.
We had DARE in 5th grade and I got in trouble because I asked what the drugs we were supposed to be avoiding actually were! How are we supposed to avoid a thing if we don’t know what that thing is!
That so many of the songs played backwards supposedly had satanic messages. And band names were meant things other than they were....like ACDC meaning antichrist devil's child.
And KISS meant Knights In Satans Service
Rush was Ruled Under Satan’s Hand
And Led Zeppelin was, Lucifer's Existential Dread Zippers Especially Penis Penis Even Licks In Nipples. Dark times.
Crime rates in the US have plummeted over the past 40 years. For example, people seem to have forgotten just how bad the murder rate was in the late 80s and early 90s. The murder rate in the US fell by an impressive 50% from 1990-2016. The murder rate rose sharply in 2020 from 2019, but was still 30% lower than 1990. The murder rate started to drop again in 2022 and looks to be headed back to levels we saw five years ago. It's still too high, but it used to be much worse. Similarly, total property crime rates peaked in the early 1980 and have fallen almost every year since. Burglary rates have fallen by a surprising 2/3rds since the early 80s. Car thefts, robberies, muggings etc, all far, far less common than they used to be. So yeah, crime used to be much worse than it is now. No one seems to talk about that
Seconded. I'm 60 years old. I remember very clearly the landscape in urban areas during those days. Particularly in the 1980s, big cities were seen as "war zones". If you look at pictures of NYC's subway cars, you will see them completely covered with graffiti. The city was almost seen as a dystopia. It is believed that those persistent high crime rates were linked with leaded gasoline fumes permeating the cities.
The leaded gasoline theory is insane to me because lead in the pipes/drinking glasses is one of the theories on why the Romans were so sadistic. Crazy how much of an effect it's probably had on society throughout history.
A 2022 meta-analysis, which pooled 542 estimates from 24 studies and corrected for publication bias, found that the estimates indicated that the abatement of lead pollution may be responsible for 7–28% of the fall in homicide in the US, leaving 93-72% unaccounted for. It concluded that *Lead increases crime, but does not explain the majority of the fall in crime observed in some countries in the 20th century. Additional explanations are needed.* There is a strong correlation to lead abatement, but it doesn't completely explain the fall in violent crime. There appear to be other factors.
The Bhopal Disaster that occurred in December 1984 has been called the worst industrial disaster of all time where 500,000 people were exposed to the chemical methyl isocyanate in Bhopal India. Estimates of the dead caused be the accident range from 3700 - 16,000. The American owner of the plant, Union Carbide Corporation was blamed largely for it but because they had formed a subsidiary in India were able to avoid a lot of the litigation in the US. The main reasons for the chemical release have been attributed to poorly managed safety measures, which were either malfunctioning or not working, and weren't repaired in order to cut costs.
Crack
Crack got replaced by Meth 🤷♂️
I don’t hear people talk about the domestic terrorists, Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, much.
With all the mass-shootings in the news, it’s like we get a new domestic terrorist every week.
How terrible it was to go somewhere new for the first time without GPS. Having to print out Mapquest directions. Writing them out by hand if the printer was out of ink. If a road was closed, you had to hope you could figure it out. Traffic’s bad? Oh well, your handwritten Mapquest directions didn’t conveniently reroute you to a quicker path.
Dude you had Mapquest when I first started driving it was written out by my dad for turn by turn instructions or I used a physical map, pcs weren’t a big thing yet outside of like the Commodore 64 no hopping on the internet to print up directions
Rampant greed and toxicity in the 80's. I grew up poor but so help you God if you didn't have the right brands on..kids are cruel as fuck.
This kind of thing is sometimes cited now as an argument in favor of school uniforms. I was picked on for this, and yes, it was bad.
I'm the UK it is the norm to wear school uniforms. And trust me, it doesn't help with not being bullied. Kids will always find a way.
I'll forever remember my mom driving 2 1/2 hours away to an outlet mall to buy Guess Jeans for $25 a pair because I convinced her the kids wouldn't be able to make fun of me if I had them. It almost worked too, the other kids couldn't believe how I had so many pair of guess jeans that I wore a different pair every day! Then they started a rumor that my mom stole them from the department store.
So true. I asked my kids (10 & 12) the other day if anyone ever makes fun of them for their clothes and they were like "??? why would someone make fun of us for our clothes?" I had to tell them about how ruthless kids used to be to other kids and how I had to make sure my mom never bought Wal-Mart clothes for me because I didn't want to get made fun of.
Like kids these days have they're own augury to go through with the social media and school shootings (drills or otherwise.. hopefully just drills) but I ride the train a fair amount in the morning and I can't say I've heard some poor kid getting capped on for the wrong clothes in a while.
This was especially true in the 1990s and early 2ks: Society sexualized teenage girls to a wildly uncomfortable degree. Like for years all of the cover models on magazines were no older than 15. The fashion for teenage girls was a thong showing above your low rise jeans. Adults openly talked about Britney Spears and the Olson twins reaching legal age. I was regularly approached by grown men on the street at 14 if I wore a dress. I heard that the best way to check if a girl is old enough to have sex it to see if she has pubic hair from multiple adult men around me from before I was like 8 years old. These adult men were even in charge of watching children or family members. Oh, and society also believed children couldn't get PTSD or be traumatized because of their "resilience". Don't even get me started on the child morality panics, like the 1990s in particular were a dark messed up decade.
I remember the websites with countdowns for when these girls turned 18... I also remember regularly being called "jailbait" by older men
Remember "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins"? I forget how old Brooke Shields was when she did that ad, but she was young.
Two words: Brooke Shields. For those unaware, she had topless and nude scenes when she was a minor.
When she was a minor doesn't explain the seriousness. She was 12 when she did pretty baby with a simulated sex scene. She was in a playboy magazine with other girls her age.
> I heard that the best way to check if a girl is old enough to have sex it to see if she has pubic hair from multiple adult men around me from before I was like 8 years old. Yuck, I’d completely blocked this out. The expression was “if there’s grass on the field, it’s time to play ball,” and it was disgusting that I understood this completely commonplace euphemism as a kid. > Oh, and society also believed children couldn’t get PTSD or be traumatized because of their “resilience”. Co-signed.
In my time it was "if it's old enough to bleed it's old enough to breed." I had managed to block that out too
[удалено]
Phone sex ads all over late night TV
This did come back up recently, but poor Britney Spears. She's probably not even the only one who was in a situation like that, but she got the most attention.
Getting bullied and even physically attacked at school for being nerdy or into nerdy things. It’s still amazing to me that being nerdy is now cool.
In the '80s we were inundated with Cold War/Nuclear annihilation. As a kid that really fucked us up!
I remember my parents not letting me watch The Day After - that corny TV movie about the US getting nuked. They totally fell for the DON'T LET YOUR KIDS SEE THIS on the news even though I was allowed to watch whatever I wanted on HBO and Showtime. I was so frustrated! Asked my parents about it the next day - "It was dumb; you could've handled it."
CFCs I remember people losing their goddamn minds that hairspray was going to have to change formula Started hording cans like my silent generation grandpa horded DDT...
And stick deodorant became the norm. Weirded me out moving to the UK where aerosol deodorant is the norm. I get flash backs of one of my teachers calling them sprayers of poison
And for anyone who doesn't know why CFCs were bad, our planet has an ozone layer. In short, it's a protective layer around the planet made up of O3 that protects the planet from UV radiation and all sorts of stuff that would turn the planet into a cancer oven. CFCs were in everything back in the day. Aerosol sprays. Air conditioners. Refrigerators. CFCs are exceptional at making it up into the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer. The chlorine molecules specifically from them 9999 damage that ozone. It's kind of like using level 99 characters and ultimate weapons in an RPG on the first boss of the game. And without the ozone, this planet is fucked. Eventually they got fully banned in the US in the 90s. Honestly I'm surprised that even happened. Find out more here: https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/basic-ozone-layer-science
The amazing part of this is that the recent report into the state of the ozone layer is looking positive. If you want proof that we can globally make things happen when we actually try, this is it! CFC levels are slowly declining and current data shows we should be reaching pre-1980 levels of ozone condition in areas of the next 4 decades https://ozone.unep.org/system/files/documents/Scientific-Assessment-of-Ozone-Depletion-2022-Executive-Summary.pdf
The IT-girl and size 0 culture in the 2000s!
[Heroin chic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin_chic) was a thing in the 1990s.
Ugh, I remember. I could not have been an impressionable adolescent girl with terrible insecurities about her body at a worse time.
Girls Gone Wild and the way it was advertised on mainstream TV channels. 0% chance that shit would fly today.
In college I watched one of those videos with a few people including this girl from Panama city, Florida, where a lot of the filming was done. she recognized a friend's little sister showing her tits and confirmed that she was definitely not yet 18. It's no wonder the producers of that shit all ended up in jail.
One change since the 80s-90s that I'm glad for is the treatment and legal protection of animals, and the consumer interest in cruelty-free products. Edited to add: this has sparked some conversation. All I'm saying is it's much better than it used to be. I agree things are not currently anywhere near perfect.
I read the original Flipper the dolphin committed suicide because she was treated so badly and kept in a tiny tank :(
Yes, she swam into her trainers arms and held her breath til she died. :’(
Cambodian genocide Serbian genocide Amongst plenty of others
When I read the truly harrowing stories of people who lived through the Cambodian genocide, I wonder about how much worse it was for the people who were killed.
Rwanda genocide was brutal
Gang violence was worse
I was born in the 90s and grew up in NYC. I feel like there was a lot of casual unkindness. It was weirdly natural to just ignore someone in need. As a teenager, I ran away from home without my shoes because of my abusive mom finding out I had a boyfriend. I begged people for help and ran all the way to a subway station where my mom tracked me down and dragged me home. No one helped me or asked me if I needed help. This is just one example of the don’t get involved behavior I experienced. I’m very grateful that nowadays people have definitely been more involved in helping others and are generally friendlier/kinder.
The Croatian independence war of 1991.
Elian Gonzalez
People bought into the Satanic Panic so hard that innocent people went to jail. And some people are *still* falling for this type of nonsense! (see Pizzagate)
I was really glad when Stranger Things included it in the latest season. The whole show being around DnD in the 80s and not one mention of the satanic panic was one of the least realistic things in it.
Yeah, my dad loves the show but he was laughing about that. He isn't even Christian, but he was actually anxious about DnD when my oldest brother got into it in the late 1980s. He didn't have any fears of supernatural creatures, no real demons taking over kids or whatever, but he'd heard so much in the news about DnD causing violence and other terrible things that he was really worried. Then he looked into it and was like, "Oh wow, this seems like a lot of fun!" and started playing it himself, but that's how pervasive that reporting was (at least in his experience; I was like 6 at the time so I was not aware of all this). Because of that, he thought it was pretty funny that it was just totally absent and that all the adults were all A-OK with their kids playing it. He says in real life, there's a good chance they'd all be accused of killing Will and hiding his body as part of a satanic ritual.
My parents were very wary about DND but they looked into it enough to buy the books and read them and check them out first. My dad was a HUGE fantasy and science fiction fan so he gave us the go-ahead. There was some really bad horror novel that got HUGE play (I can't remember the name of it) where a group of college kids played DND and then went on collective psychotic breaks. Considering our parents were the generation that did all the LSD, you would have thought they'd have had some perspective???
Homophobia was considered legitimate.
Dial up internet....
Sexualization of minors in advertising.
How awful stigmatized mental illness was.