So not much has changed?
Well a Bush was President at the end of the Cold War and on Sep. 11th but it was two different people. 
I think the older ones do. I certainly remember that the economy of the early 90s wasn’t great, but it improved as we moved towards the end of the decade. Ditto for the early 80s. I wasn’t in the workforce in the early 70s, but I recall my parents and their friends being concerned about the economy in those days. The difficult part for you and your contemporaries, Qin, is that you’ve never experienced this before, and it seems pretty bad. It is, but it will end.
If you’ve ever read Being There, by Jerzy Kozinski (or seen the movie), you’ll recall that the gardener Chance gets a lot of respect for his (inadvertent) observation that the economy moves in cycles. As I, and others of my age and older can attest, Chance’s observation is true. There will be an end to this; how or why or when, I cannot say. But while it may seem like things are bad now, they will get better–they always have.
The 90’s were awesome, especially towards the end. No cold war, no immediate threats, jobs were stupidly easy to get, the internet was new and promising, music was good. Yeah, when I get a time machine…
At the airport, you could walk right up to a gate without a ticket. If you wanted to pick someone up at the airport you could be there right as they stepped off the plane. Heck, a whole season of Friends was based on that.
I read a book recently called 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, bu Joshua Clover, which was about the shifts in American/British popular music around the end of the Cold War. The “Second Summer of Love” (partially '60s nostalgia, partially electronic music and Ecstasy) occurred during this period, but so did the rise of grunge and gangster rap. Clover argues that post-Cold War music was largely apolitical, and generally did not criticize either the domestic government or foreign powers. In the absence of a clear political enemy popular music tended to go in one of three directions: 1) there is no enemy, we’re all one (rave culture and a lot of mainstream pop), 2) the enemy is inside yourself (grunge), or 3) the enemy is within your community (gangster rap).
I didn’t entirely agree with all this, but it was interesting and a lot of it did match up with my memories of the era. While Americans weren’t worried about attacks by external forces, you did hear a lot about internal threats to the peace and stability of our nation: gang violence, serial killers, school shootings, violent/suicidal cults, domestic terrorism (Oklahoma City bombing), and even Satanic child molesters. Right around the end of the Cold War there also seemed to be a lot of concern about the thriving Japanese economy, although as it turned out they were experiencing a bubble that was about to burst.
Not that it was all gloom and doom, I’m just saying we managed to find things to worry about even after the Berlin Wall came down.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
It was the good old days.
Bush was perceived as a harmless buffoon rather than a buffoon, I was making fantastic amounts of money, and lots of people were being attacked by sharks.
In the United States, yes, and in other places too. But not everywhere–here in Canada, we have not been able to go to the gate without a boarding pass since the introduction of metal detectors in the early 1970s. It always boggled my mind when I went to the US (or other countries) to find that travellers could be met at the gate by local people who were just there to me, meet them. Good point though, about airline security–it was nothing like today.
I remember in some juvenile friends and I celebrated New years 2001 by thrrowing a firecracker Into a store in a mall and yelling Happy New Year. People… Were startled for a second and then laughed.
If anybody did that today they would be lucky not to get shot.
They weren’t like any one thing. It’s not like people knew a big terrorist attack was coming and that circumstances were going to be different. People lived however they lived and most of them didn’t conceive that it could be otherwise. I think that people who were old enough to remember the more intense days of the Cold War - I’m not part of that group - certainly saw it as a period of much lower tension, and I think most people paid a bit less attention to international affairs aside from perhaps Israel/Palestine. Most people did not think about security the way they do now. Terrorism was something you saw in the movies or reports about Israel, you didn’t expect to hear about it anyplace else. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was horrible, but I don’t think many people were really considering the idea that there were organizations of people who could pull off something like that on a larger scale. McVeigh and Nichols were two guys and they acted more or less on their own. Even the embassy 1998 bombings in Africa did not make a major dent on the popular consciousness from what I could see. It was just not something most people could imagine being brought to the United States from outside, and since September 11th, that has been very conceivable.
A lot of other things were not that different. Republicans and Democrats thought the other party was destroying the country, political discourse was vile and frequently stupid, parents were scared about the music their kids were listening to and the stuff they were watching and playing, and on and on.
My daughters were born in 1991 and 1993. We were too busy to notice most of the Nineties, so I really don’t remember much about what was happening outside the house.
The major sex scandal in the NYC area was the Donna–Rudy–Judy show. Guiliana went from a scandal to a national hero that day. Deservedly, I might add. What he did was amazing.
You could look into the sky and see a plane flying low without totally freaking out. I live in the Teterboro Airport landing zone, and watched them from my second story window.
Whenever something happened, your first thought was not terrorism. When the NYC buildings started to shake from the earthquake, some people ran to their windows expecting to see a plane.
Presidential campaigns were also different in that defense and national security primarily came up in the context of dealing with threats overseas and protecting American interests (whatever those happened to be that week) through traditional military means, not so much about the idea of keeping terrorists from entering the country or attacking through screening and border security and such.
Oh, I do remember that the Y2K bug was going to end civilization as we knew it. How could I have forgotten that?
I remember hearing a college commencement speaker from 2002: When you entered, we were all thining about Y2K. As you leave, we are all thinking about 9/11.
It was the End of History.
While US prospects were bright, the culture was surprisingly dark and cynical. The X-Files. Grunge. Heroin Chic. Gangsta rap. Seinfeld. Branch Davidians.
Oh, and don’t forget August 8th, 1995, the day the world (or, at least, the San Francisco bay area) changed. On that date, Jerry Garcia died and Netscape kicked off the Internet boom with its IPO. Talk about turning points!
Uh, that story was in 2009, years after 9/11/2001.
It should be pointed out that most of these things were big stories in August, which is traditionally a slow news month. The concept of a slow news month is kind of absurd, but people spend less time watching TV and Congress isn’t in session. It’s not like people were talking about shark attacks and Danny Almonte instead of the presidential election in 2000.