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Oh I wish
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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Not to bum you out but the 90s being good is because you were a kid. For example, in '96, they were "cracking down on welfare queens" in a bipartisan welfare reform effort that specifically fucked over poor folk and people of color in a conservative effort to force work requirements while simultaneously making it harder to claim disability.
You still had racial redlining, war on drugs, satanic panic, homophobia, child abuse, bullying, etc... people were just less informed because the Internet was in its infancy.
Actually let me put a positive spin for young people; today is probably better (on average) to grow up because of all the advances in education, medicine, psychology, etc.; people actually have their psychological needs addressed more, die of illness less, and are generally more educated than in the 90s-- hell, every generation is about 10-15 IQ higher than the previous, you just don't see it since it's standardized and set to 100. Not that IQ is a great metric for intelligence, but it's a good indicator that people are more educated than previously.
Don't forget that Clinton was just on the verge of privatizing social security and medicare with republicans when news leaked about the blow job:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/05/29/the-pact-between-bill-clinton-and-newt-gingrich
My stepdad jokes Clinton was his favorite Republican president. This is the reason why. Lol
When people talk about the 90s being good and better than today, they aren’t just remembering being a child or waxing poetic like boomers do about the 50s. What they are actually talking about is the hope and inspiration that came with the New World Order and everything else that was going on in the 90s.
People don’t remember it but first world country doesn’t mean better country it means NATO country. Second world was referring to countries aligned with the Warsaw Pact, and third world were countries not aligned with either. When the second world fell at the end of the Soviet Union the expectation was that the second world would become part of the first world and the third world would begin it moves towards being a benevolent second world and eventually become part of the first world too.
In addition to a political upheaval that was representative of the relief of decades of Cold War, there were also huge scientific advances being made. Things like the International Space Station, Hubble, and the Voyager program were all returning science and becoming realities. We had just discovered for instance that Jupiter had rings. Not to mention things like the Montreal Accords.
It was also a time of a second coming of the civil rights movement, the 90s are when it became OK to be gay for the most part. 1992 was The Year of the Woman, largely in response to and in spite of the Anita Hill debacle. There was an open-mindedness and a willingness to accept progress that just disappeared a few years later.
It’s that, that hope and willingness to accept science, that’s what people miss about the 90s, and it’s what people were really hoping Obama would bring back.
And I fully recognize that the Rush Limbaughs and Fox Newses of the world where already well passed the point of no return for killing off this feeling well before the 90s came around. I’m just talking about why people wax poetic about the 90s and it’s not just people who were kids, even my parents talk about what it was like to be gay and out in the 90s and the hope and inspiration that came with that.
Hard disagree, that hope and inspiration nonsense is totally ahistotical and the exact same thing boomers do with the 1950s and 60s (for them it was the atomic age and sexual revolution and being optimistic that fascism and world wars were behind them)
And a bunch of first world hopes that everyone would just forget all coups and death squads and other terrible stuff we did in the cold war, and hopes that we could all just finally forget about fighting for civil rights and the environment and other tough stuff like that because we'd somehow permanently solved those issues and could just turn everything over to markets.
Matthew Shepherd was murdered in 1998, legal rights like health insurance access for partners and hospital visitations wouldn't come til decades later, we were still educating most people on the fact that AIDS wasn't just a gay disease, etc.
But the Anita Hill debacle did happen, plus Jerry Seinfeld dated a high schooler and nobody thought it was weird, and whether or not sexual harassment was a real thing society needed to care about was still being argued (you can see this in all sorts of pop culture from the time, the whole attack on "political correctness" was all about dudes wanting to be able to say misogynistic shit at the office and not get called out for it)
Pundits on TV called black teenagers super predators and said they should be tried as adults and tons of states changed their laws to make it easier to do exactly that