The 80s
The Golden Shower theory of Trickle Down Economics, the birth of Yuppies and the death of Hippies. The Cold War; the Gang War; and the Drug War. Greed was good, consumption was in, the rich got richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class strangled between them.
Men wore make-up and women wore shoulder pads. Anorexics were giving all of their food to the bulimics while people starved in Africa. Pro-lifers were killing abortion doctors, the crack babies had AIDS, the AIDS babies were on crack, and we were all turning Japanese.
The 90s
The collapse of the USSR, apartheid, and the crime rate. The economy was booming, the slacking slackers were working all night, and optimism and interest rates were high on a new world order. Twenty-something was the new thirty-something, rock was alternative, and girls were spicy.
Harry Potter was on his cell phone drinking Starbucks while surfing the internet on his netbook and preparing for Y2K.
The 00s
The W stands for the Wire, the W stands for war, the W stands for worse. 9/11. The economy was Bushwhacked, Sex was in the City, Buffy was slaying, and bubbles were popping. Regulations? We don’t need no stinking regulations!
While we were getting high on legal marijuana climate change brought us Katrina. Our iPods were full of Beyoncé and Brittany while we Googled fashion makeovers from head to house to watch on YouTube from our smart phones.
Those are three of the decades I have lived through. My birth was early enough in the seventies that I lived thorough those years as well, but I was young enough that the time– as a decade, didn’t really leave an impression. One thing all of these American decades have in common is gun violence. Particularly mass shootings. Back in the eighties they seemed to happen in post offices to the point that we referred to it as going Postal. There was even a video game.
The late eighties and early nineties brought such an explosion of gun violence that, for the most part, mass shootings sort of faded into the chaos. Then crime, “blue collar” crime, inexplicably plummeted. No one really knows why. There are lots of theories, correlations, and people claiming credit, but the truth, as it often is, is ambiguous. But with the drop in violent crime mass shootings again became noticeable.
By some measures mass shootings are no more frequent than they have been for decades, at least since the eighties. This is in part because there is no formal definition for a mass shooting. By any measure they are deadlier. Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Pulse, Las Vegas… It’s only May and there have been two major mass shootings, both at schools, already this year. The latest on the eighteenth of this month. The murder of ten people fought for attention with the Royal Wedding and lost. After all, this will be the last royal wedding in Britain for a while whereas in the US there will be another mass shooting next week, next month, this summer. Soon enough.
Obviously the above is Americancentric, though I spent most of my time since the early two thousands outside of the country. As with many things it is sometimes easier to see clearly from the outside. It wasn’t until I started spending significant time outside of the US that I realized how much stress and fear has been normalized in my home country. In mass shootings and gun violence America is the exception among developed countries. Too often, this is what American exceptionalism means. That the rest of the world looks upon us aghast as we stay behind and they move forward.
I wonder how we will think about the 2010s? They don’t even have a name for this generation, the one my daughter belongs to. They are too young to be marketed to, I guess. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the world my daughter will inherit. The world that we are building now. It makes me both worried and motivated.