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How do we compare to the ’90s?

Published on 39 Comments on How do we compare to the ’90s?

Over lunch I was pondering the fact that people forget so quickly about the problems of the past, which is part of what makes the problems of the present seem so overwhelming and unique. But just compare today to the late '60s, the era of Vietnam, the Cold War, the Six Day War, race riots, rivers catching on fire, assassinations, campus unrest, drugs, the Democratic Convention, the Moynihan report, and so much more. We look pretty good

But that's too easy. How about comparing the present to the calmest decade of recent years? I guess that would be the '90s, right? The Cold War was over, the internet was booming, the economy was great. Those were the days!

But it didn't always seem that way at the time. I trawled through Time covers of the '90s to see what was on our minds back then, and it's sort of amazing—even to me—how much of it is not just familiar, but nearly identical. Just think of all the things we've forgotten about: Good jobs going away;1 crack babies;2 obesity;3 wars in the Gulf, Somalia, and Kosovo;4 sarin gas; sex trafficking;5 music and movies debasing us;6 Los Angeles is doomed;7 Asia is out-competing us;8 the incredible shrinking president;9 gun violence out of control;10 the AIDS epidemic;11 superpredators; busybodies and crybabies;12 OJ; genocide in Rwanda;13 Timothy McVeigh; Newt Gingrich;14 Whitewater;15 Matthew Shepard; rampant crime;16 Muslim terrorism;17 impeachment;18 kids are slackers;19 Milosovic; cyberporn;20 Columbine;21 the new racism;22 is a presidential candidate too old?23

And that's a good decade.


1cf. Millennials are screwed
2cf. fentanyl
3cf. obesity and Ozempic
4cf. Ukraine and Gaza
5cf. Pizzagate, Epstein, etc.
6cf. social media disinformation
7We're still here!
8cf. China taking our jobs
9cf. Biden is so unpopular
10cf. gun violence is out of control
11cf. COVID-19
12cf. Karens
13cf. genocide in Gaza
14cf. Donald Trump
15cf. Hunter Biden
16cf. allegedly rampant crime
17cf. Muslim terrorism
18cf. impeachment
19cf. kids are slackers
20cf. social media is destroying our youth
21cf. Sandy Hook etc.
22cf. DEI and social justice
23cf. Joe Biden is too old

39 thoughts on “How do we compare to the ’90s?”

    1. Lounsbury

      People Are People.

      Media can not be better than its audience.

      Humans are in end just augmentation of Chimps with time horizon and mentality of a chump band. We pretend otherwise but it is self delusion and pretence.

      Declinism and Oh our Modern Monent is The Worst writing all the way back to Rome at its greatest and beyond.

      Humans are just utterly incapable at scale of not being this way.

    1. Lounsbury

      Et voilà, the vey picture of the repeated cycle of human cognitive error and Childhood Era Better from memory sélection bias.

      Will never change. (barring genetic engineering I suppose)

    2. Crissa

      Hope, yes, but it was much harder to transition and we didn't dare use the language we have today even in queer spaces.

      But uhh, I could change my gender by getting a note from a doctor or social worker, walking to the social security office, and asking. Hadta know the secret number at the capital to get the one office charged with fixing it on my driver's license. And ended up needing help from a nascent transgender law fund (named after a girl who committed suicide after being harassed) to get a judge who interfered with my name-change taken off the docket... But...

      Yeah, I guess it was a time we just were getting over the AIDS crisis and we still had gay ghettos and community. But now community is centered around kids, and making sure they don't face the challenges we did.

    3. Salamander

      Not after "Newt" Gingrich forced his ugly puss onto the scene, augmented by the loathsome Rush Limbaugh. Public discourse went from contentious to vicious, lies became standard, Republicans decided insults were enough, and the Clintons (both of 'em) were in the cross hairs. Not yet literally, though.

  4. megarajusticemachine

    That is none of those things ha ha, that's just Time trying to gin up some fear to sell copies, the clickbait of its day. Media literacy Kevin, c'mon!

    1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

      AIDS. The genocide in Rwanda. The war in Kosovo. Columbine. The OKC bombing.

      You are either a troll or just too young to remember the 90's.

      1. megarajusticemachine

        Sorry but I fail your No True Scotsman test because I do remember all those very important topics. I was reading Time at the time, and also recall all the other BS fear-bait articles also listed there, and the often late to the game "do we really have to talk about gay people OK I guess so" type of facile coverage of the important ones you cherry-picked.

  9. cephalopod

    It was never really covered much by the US press, but the 90s saw the start of the Second Congo War, the deadliest war since the end of WWII.

    1. Crissa

      Killed twenty times as many civilians from disrupted food/water/medicine than it did direct deaths, too. Nasty. But small potatoes compared to the horror of a world war.

  12. Leo1008

    Here's an oft overlooked event of the early 90s which still continues to reverberate in recent headlines: "Demolition of the Babri Masjid" (that's the title of the Wiki page):

    "The demolition of the Babri Masjid was carried out on 6 December 1992 by a large group of activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad and allied organisations. The 16th-century Babri Masjid in the city of Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, India, had been the subject of a lengthy socio-political dispute ...

    "On 6 December 1992 the VHP and the BJP organised a rally at the site involving 150,000 people. The rally turned violent, and the crowd overwhelmed security forces and tore down the mosque."

    The BJP went on to rule India and transform it from a Democracy to what is now arguably one of the world's largest theocracies.

    And from just two days ago @ Al Jazeera: "Babri mosque to Ram temple: A timeline from 1528 to 2024: Ram temple is inaugurated in northern Ayodhya city 32 years after a Hindu nationalist mob demolished the Mughal era Babri mosque."

    The significance of that 1992 event may have been overlooked during an "end of history" era when the consensus view saw Liberal democracy as ascendant. But, in fact, the BJP and their Hindu nationalist approach may have been a more accurate foreshadowing for many of our present conflicts.

    1. Lounsbury

      Come on: ""end of history" era when the consensus view saw Liberal democracy as ascendant" - even at the time the End of History/Ascendancy arguments was mocked and challenged on multiple fronts, Ledt and Right, hardly The Consensus View. Yes a view that got (excessive) play but hardly a real consensus, although sadly overly influential.

  13. Ogemaniac

    One thing has gotten way worse in the last 30 years: video games.

    When we were kids your parents bought to a game, you stuck it into your Nintendo or PlayStation, and you immediately played. Now you buy a game for a kid and have to spend an hour fiddling with accounts and apps to get it set up, and then listen to their eternal begging about the up-sells.

    1. Leo1008

      @Ogemaniac:

      Books have gotten worse for similar reasons. Back in the day, you bought a printed book and - that was it. You bought it. Done. You owned it. And you could do what you wanted with it. You could read it immediately or put it on a shelf for ten years, pick it up, and read it then. Pretty simple. We had a refined, perfect technology.

      But now you might get stuck dealing with E-readers, remote manipulation of your virtual “library,” passwords, OS updates, batteries that constantly need to be recharged, internet connections, internet bills, app downloads, compatibility issues, cracked screens, corrupted files, and god knows what else tech idiots try to gaslight the public into accepting as “progress.”

      Books have taken a giant step backwards.

      1. aldoushickman

        "Books have taken a giant step backwards."

        Well, no--books are still books. There are a variety of other ways to read novels etc. that have cropped up, and they all have their pluses and minuses. Sounds like you don't like digital books (I don't particularly care for them, either), but they didn't really _displace_ traditional books, so it's not fair to say that books themselves have taken a "step backwards," giant or otherwise.

      2. Five Parrots in a Shoe

        The writer John Scalzi has acknowledged that a significant fraction of his income - like, more than 1/3 - is from ebook sales.
        If there is that much money in ebooks then a whole bunch of people must really like them.

    2. Solarpup

      My 90's self, who once pulled an all nighter to start and finish "Aliens vs. Predator" on an Atari Jaguar, would have been *amazed* at some of the stuff that came out in the next 30 years. (But the fact that so many games today push into the 100's of hours these days, in an attempt to lock you into a world of micro-transactions, is a different story.)

      Although I do lament the relative lack of couch co-op in the modern world. It seems to have gravitated 99% towards on line co-op, with there being a notable exception every 5 years or so. (Thank you, Baldur's Gate 3.) God forbid you actually play a video game with someone sitting next to you.

  14. Meaux

    This just shows that the media does doom and gloom and it's relative to whatever the baseline is. For example, on obesity, literally every state in the US today would be categorized in the worst category for obesity in 2003. That said, crime is a lot better now than it was in the 90s.

    You're never going to get a time when the media isn't clogging something being wrong because no one buys a newspaper to read "everything is fine". You can't judge the problems of a time based on Time covers, you have to look at the actual facts.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fmhluc5acAIgz1r.jpg

  15. Jim Carey

    All of those 90s issues seemed terrible at the time, they still do today, and there's no doubt they were enormously costly.

    But a demented sociopath openly running on an extremist authoritarian platform for president (of the most powerful nation on planet which that happens to be the keystone of and the last great hope for human freedom and civilization's survival), and who is leading many polls? Priceless!

  16. royko

    First, yes. Trump's unique in the whole peaceful transfer of power thing -- although there were people online worrying W would go the dictator route. Congress was pretty dysfunctional back then, but the Republican party was more stable before the Tea Party/Q/MAGA. They could pick a Speaker and pass a budget.

    But it was the era of "divided government", where some people were rooting for gridlock. Crime was a huge concern in the 80s/90s, and still is even though it's so much better.

    I guess the biggest detrimental changes are: 1) Fox News, 2) Trump, 3) the small erosion of social/political norms that add up.

    We really seem to be in a post-Pandemic, post-Trump malaise. I can't really explain it or point to one thing. Maybe the shock of the pandemic created a trauma. I don't know. But it seems more psychological than anything.

    1. Jim Carey

      "I can't really explain it or point to one thing."

      I can. I point to the first scientific principle and the conversation is over, which is the opposite of what the principle is telling us to do. Then I point to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment, the stabilizing foundation that capitalism is built on, and the conversation is over, which is the opposite of what the theory is telling use to do. Then I bring up the Parable of the Good Samaritan's idea that we must love our neighbors as ourselves and the conversation is over, which is the opposite of what the parable is telling us to do.

      Correlation? Yes. Common cause? I say yes, and now I assume the conversation is over.

  17. NeilWilson

    Billy Joel was right.
    We didn’t start the fire.
    ….
    JFK blown away
    What else do I have to say

    After we are gone
    It will still burn on and on

  19. spatrick

    Bottom line: Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

    In the 1990s my source of entertainment was a combination VH1 on TV or going to my office on a Sunday afternoon because it something called "the internet" and participating in a group chat for hours because I had nothing better to do. I was single and always broke.

    After you get married and or have children and grow older you do miss the sense of freedom you once had when you were younger even though you never really did much of anything with it.

    So of course the 1990s look better in retrospect (especially after 9-11 and COVID-19) even though I didn't quite feel it at the time.

    All decades and epochs of time have their problems, but I will say the issues of the 1990s look quaint compared to 21st Century.
    .

  20. Kevin M

    We had Columbine in the 90s and Sandy Hook in the 21st century. But this is a false equivalency. We have had far more mass shootings in the last twenty years. The five most fatal mass shootings in American history all occurred after 2000.

    And as a result, we are now far more skeptical of the right-wing, open-ended interpretation of the 2nd amendment. NOT!

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