How did it feel, seeing the dictatorships collapse and look at the newspaper and see good news?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution 1974
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_in_Brazil 1985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea#Sixth_Republic_(1987–present) 1988
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process 1983
Plane hijackings, gas lines/limits, mortgage interest rates over 10%, school bomb threats, …
We had movies and songs about nuclear war, Russians, bombing Iran, etc. because these were daily concerns.
Rivers on fire, gay bashing, satanic panic, abortion clinic bombings, acid rain…
Shit was wild, and often not in a good way. 70s fashion was groovy, though.
My town when I was growing up used to test the air raid sirens at noon on Saturday. Two 30 second runs, 5 seconds apart (so we’d know it was the test and not a real warning).
I used to call it the “noon whistle” and it was how I knew to come in from playing in the yard for lunch.
You forgot ozone layer depletion. :)
No love for acid rain?
I always figured maybe the acid rain would save us from the killer bees.
Rivers on fire, gay bashing, satanic panic, abortion clinic bombings, acid rain…
Okay, but we have all of that now, too. What was different?
No - literally rivers were on fire.
And gay bashing was mainstream, fully tolerated, very common. Lakes were turning clear like swimming pools due to acid rain - kinda pretty, but totally dead.People seem to forget that GenX saw this shit and was like, no more. That’s what led to the current drive to fix this. Buy GenX doesn’t get credit for starting it – we’re grouped with boomers for some reason.
No - literally rivers were on fire.
BP lit the Gulf on fire a while back. Nevermind the drought induced wildfires all through the Mountain West.
And gay bashing was mainstream, fully tolerated, very common.
Texas Senate Bill 12 is bringing it back.
Lakes were turning clear like swimming pools due to acid rain - kinda pretty, but totally dead.
We had a climate-related disaster every four days last year.
Think of that but continuous. Sure there seems to be to be more environmental disasters than ever but each is a one off.
- Dead lakes and crumbling masonry from acid rain were continuous. For years
- BP having an oil spill eventually goes away, but rivers were toxic for decades, repeatedly starting on fire
The rivers of fire was one major thing that contributed to the formation of the EPA, actually. In the preceding decades, if was totally normal for industry to just dump whatever waste into rivers and nobody cared.
We still have far too much pollution going on, but I feel many people have forgotten just how egregious it was before government regulations were put in place to stop shit like that.
It’s pretty bad now, but more to the point, we’re still paying for the wanton destruction wrought decades ago. And now ‘conservatives’ (air quotes because in this case, it’s the opposite) want to roll back regulations because freedom.
I’ve been through river cleanups everywhere I ve lived. There’s always something toxic that corps got away with dumping for so many years and then just left it. Government on the hook for so many billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. Where’s that sense of personal/corporate responsibility we hear so much about?
You obviously weren’t around for the 1980s, and that’s OK! But don’t try to shoehorn current events into what we dealt with in the past.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. This is a snarky post, right? Not serious?
I already had them tagged as “fascist simp”
Major optimism, like everyone was breathing a big sigh of relief.
Bit naive perhaps, but there you are.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
That said, it’s still much better today, just that power brokers never change - they just always look for the new way to sell the same old ideas.
The Hapsburgs didn’t go away, they just changed team jerseys so people wouldn’t realize it was still them.
Kind of puts into perspective civilizations ending from climate change in a century vs in 30 minutes. By the time we would have learned about world ending nuclear war, we’d already have ended. For climate change there’s still hope we will do something
At least there’s still hope in that box.
Can we please relive that now?
You mean the period where people in my birth country weren’t allowed to leave, still doing “cultural revolution” and “struggle sessions”. Poverty everywhere (actually still a lot of poverty nowadays too, but it wasmuch worse back then).
Meanwhile in America, even though this was after Civil Rights, Black people are still getting hated on and lynchings still happen. A time where it’s still practically impossible for someone who looks like Obama to become president. Discrimination was rampant. Disability rights wasn’t even a thing yet. LGBT rights aren’t definitely not socially acceptable at that time.
Why do people always worship the past so much?
Its not so much past worship, just tired of seeing the same “new far right guy picks up steam/gets elected” news, wondering how it was seeing “fascists lose power/die” in the news instead.
