"Back in my day..."

Gather 'round and listen to an old man tell a tale of how things used to be. You old folks, too, as many of you seem to have forgotten.

I grew up during the Cold War, back when the Soviet Union was still a thing. It was the Eighties, so they had long since given up having children do "duck-and-cover" drills, but being vaporized by the USSR was always on our minds. We understood that if a launch occurred, we'd have 20 minutes warning, and the only thing a person could really do to help themselves in that 20 minutes was to try to make it close enough to Ground Zero to be vaporized rather than suffering a lingering death from radiation poisoning. The goths of that era, the New Wave fans, actually had a reason to think life was pointless, given that other people, over whom we had no control, could destroy the planet several times over in less time than it would take for us to drive home and say goodbye to our loved ones.

Back then, we had the conservative/liberal cultural divide, but it wasn't like it is now. After Nixon and the Vietnam War, and with the coming of age of the massive Boomer generation, the political pendulum swung far to the left. But then in the '70s, with Democrats in the White House, the economy tanked. Factories and mills shut down, leaving whole cities newly unemployed. Terrorists from the Middle East were kidnapping people, and the Dems couldn't seem to do anything about it. Our biggest cities had turned into cesspools of violent crime. The liberals were an embarrassing disappointment, so the country started swinging back to the right.

Even union Democrats voted for "Ronnie Ray Gun." They wanted someone who would punish the urban underclass for collecting welfare, execute all the criminals, and kick Russia's ass. Right-wingers sported T-shirts and bumper stickers with slogans like "Kill a Commie for Mommy." At that time, conservatives weren't styling themselves as rugged individualists going against the grain--just the opposite, in fact. Liberals were the avant garde nonconformists, while "conservative" meant just that--favoring old traditions and fashions, and finding change distasteful. The media (mostly controlled by liberals, then as now) depicted conservatives as being overly formal and stiff, the men always wearing ties, none of them daring to curse--that kind of thing.

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I don't remember where I was going with this three years ago, but maybe someone will enjoy reading this much of it. It was probably related to that one about summoning the aleax.