I was too young to remember on my own but looking back, I can’t remember anything horrible about that decade. I’m asking so someone can remind me of something that I’m just not thinking of and because I wasn’t an adult back then so there could be a lot that I don’t know simply because of my age.

44 comments

  1. NAAFTA kinda backfired. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it did take a lot of good paying jobs.

  2. It seemed pretty nice at the time. There was an economic boom, America won the Cold War, we weren’t involved in any other wars, and we even balanced the budget.

    The problems were more about what we failed to foresee: the Dot Com Bubble collapsing, the 9/11 attack, Russia falling back into totalitarianism, the subprime mortgage crisis, the cost of the war on drugs. And there was the distraction of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

  5. The Late Night Wars tore the nation apart. You had to be there to understand it.

  7. Political division was bad even then. The government shut down more than once. Even liberal politicians were usually opposed to gay marriage, no shortage of racism, the radical right really started to coalesce with the Oklahoma City bombing as a major turning point, crack was especially terrible in the early 90s, the first Boomers made “angry white man syndrome” a thing, post offices getting shot up was a tread for a while, people forget how painfully derivative music became during this time and only remember the good stuff, the “Dark Age” of comics.

  8. The Yugoslav wars were pretty bad. As was the Rawandan genocide, which seemed to begin and end almost before anyone realized what was happening.

  9. It became impossible to find shorts that didn’t look like big brother’s hand-me-downs, waiting for me to grow into them.

    Minicomputers and workstations were supplanted by PCs, in spite of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 being objectively bad systems. But I suppose the Internet boom compensated for that, at least for my personal finances.

  10. Columbine School shooting and the pathetic response to it which pretty much set up this country for more thoughts and prayers

    My school’s response, ID tags, no backpacks(which didn’t last long),tucked in shirts and other pointless dresscode changes.

  11. Blockbuster Videos pretty much everywhere, and some local rental places also continued to compete with Blockbuster too. Usually they would have a behind-the-curtain adult section. It usually wasn’t anything too hardcore, but it was still porn. And considering what Internet speeds were like in the 90s, its about the only way you would be able to get any decent video quality without paying the ridiculous price of pay-per-view.

    Some of these local video store would also sell snuff films and other weird bootlegs.

  12. I was in my twenties and free- maybe it’s rose colored glasses, but I loved the 90’s.

  13. People dont appreciate how much worse it was for the LGBT even then compared to now or even to 2013.

  16. I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but AIDS, and the whole perspective on promiscuous sex. As a late teen in the 90’s we were made to be terrified of AIDS and inherently, having sex. There were like 3 decades of fun and free spirited sexual energy, and then the 90’s rolled in and you felt like you had to wear surgical gloves just to touch a boob.

  17. Rodney King, the AIDS crisis, the collapse of Yugoslavia, Waco, the OKC bombing, and I am certain that there’s more.

  18. It was like taking too much Benadryl. Definitely no allergic reaction, a little sleepy and kind a weird… still better than the 1930’s.

  19. I remember hearing all about acid rain and there were tons of PSAs around it – it actually was a HUGE issue. It has gotten way better since then, so I guess the PSAs worked.

  20. One a lot of people should remember would be the sound of dialup connecting, and having to fight for time on the internet around the household phone calls.

    One less noticed was animal welfare had lower standards and limited ways to enforce what little standards existed.

  21. In America, it was one of the more stable decades – certainly compared to 2001-today. However, crime was pretty bad and blatant homophobia was absolutely everywhere. Also the fashion was *terrible*.

  22. People who were sick from AIDS in the 80s began dying by the score in the 90s. Until effective treatments became available around 1996, contracting HIV was still essentially a death sentence.

  24. There were a couple of years where Richmond, va had the highest murder rate in the country.

    >Until 2008, 1981 had seen the fewest killings in Richmond since 1971 (with a count of 51). The number started rising in the mid-1980s and jumped to 100 in 1988. The yearly toll stayed over 100 for 10 straight years, hitting 161 in 1994 and 140 in 1997.

    https://chpn.net/2010/07/01/on-murder-on-richmond-1971-2010/

    The AIDS crisis was in full swing.

    Freddie Mercury died in the 90’s. So did Kurt Cobaine.

    Edit: Lots of Rose colored glasses in this thread.

    Rodney King Beating plus following riots, World Trade Center bombing, OKC bombing, Bosnian genocide, Rwandan Genocide, Hurricane Andrew, Tupac death, Clarence Thomas placed in Supreme Court, Marion Barry -DC mayor- caught smoking crack, Jeffrey Dahmer was caught, David Korean -Branch Davidian raid. Horrible earthquake in LA (you think that PA 95 road falling is bad) -1994, conflict in the Balkins.

    That’s just a pinch of the 90’s.

  25. don’t remember anything bad, but that actually was when the iron curtain came down and East and West Germany got re-united, not bad though

  26. The kids were all on crack or heroin, and those goddamn evil beanie babies

  27. There was still a serious urban decay problem in a lot of major cities, much of which was attributable to the crack epidemic.

    Then again, most of these cities were far more affordable at this time than they are now.

  28. If my friends and I were hanging out the police would search us and put us in a gang index. If we refused to say we were in a gang we would be listed as an enemy gang to where we were. The school to prison pipeline was being created very fast. You could buy guns directly from dirty people who worked making them. Crack was tearing our neighborhoods apart and cops either ignored it or actively participated by taking bribes and planting drugs. Stop and frisk was rampant. It was great for the middle class, but being poor held unseen dangers that still have effects on those of us who grew up that way to this day. I was born 1980. So I was 10 to 20 in the 90s.

  29. If you lived in Rwanda or the Balkans the answer is pretty self-explanatory.

    But in the US, there was a moderate recession in the early 1990s. This helped Bill Clinton get elected and led to the phrase “it’s the economy stupid.” Granted this wasn’t too bad compared to other economic downturns and the economy ended up booming by the end of the decade.

    Also depending on your politics, the fact that it was a much more socially conservative time might rub a lot of younger people the wrong way.

  30. Haven’t seen this mentioned yet but the police beating of Rodney King and the LA riots.

    Violent crime in general was extremely high in the early 90s and started dropping quickly by the end of the decade.

  32. The way the media treated women.

    Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbit, Nicole Brown Simpson, Amy Fisher…

    If you look back at how the media treated them vs their male abusers, it’s a pretty egregious difference. We’ve still got a long way to go, but attitudes in that area have definitely improved. I’d like to think those cases would have gone over very differently today.

  34. I had to keep a book of maps in my car in case I got lost, or maybe print out a bunch of pages from Mapquest

  36. As a woman who turned 12 in 1990, heroin chic and fat-free everything sucked. It was the era of Slimfast, the cabbage soup diet, Jenny Craig, olestra, Snackwells, Dexatrim, fen-phen, Buns of Steel, supermodels, super low-rise jeans with crop tops, teen and women’s magazines low-key giving step-by-step instructions on how to have an eating disorder, etc. It was not a great time to be a teen girl.

  37. Violent crime, especially homicide was at an all time-high.
    Los Angeles was hitting over a thousand murders a year in just the city, not to mention the county. After effects of the crack epidemic and the cut throat business that came with it. Gang culture was at a violent peak, and lots of guns were on the steets, urban legend was that there was more deadlier guns accessible on the black market after the Soviet collapse (can’t verify that one).

    My theory is that in the early 90s we caught the overlap from the crime wave and social turmoil of the 70s. Kids in the 90s were raised by that generation of the 70s full of urban decay and the associated problems. We were in the tail end of a rough societal era between the late 60s and early 90s.

    And then you had more national drama like the militant right wing militias, cults, riots.

    The early 90s was an exciting yet nihilistic and fucked up period of American history.

  39. Lack of direction. Cold War ended just as the 90s started. So without the USSR, who were we? What was our goal? We built our identity on beating Communism and that had been accomplished. So the youth became directionless.

    We entered the 90s with a ton of hope. We ended them with Woodstock 99. There’s quite a few documentaries on the shit show that was.

    I wouldn’t necessarily call the 90s bad, but it seemed like a wasted opportunity to be great.

  40. Everybody and their brother was impersonating Tim Allen or Jim Carey at all times.

    They killed Tupac.

    You couldn’t turn on the TV without this Gatorade jingle playing (stg I will be singing “Like Mike” to myself for the next two years because of this comment).

    Everybody got super in to bath and body works but there were only like three flavors at the time, so every highschool in the USA was just a contact migraine of cucumber melon.

    Barney. Barney was definitely wrong with America in the 1990s.

    There was still a lot of public tobacco use in the 90s.

    You’d take a load of pictures and then pay out the ass to have 2 paper copies each of 48 photos, and maybe 4 weren’t horrible.

    Miniblinds were everywhere. And so was Michael Bolton.

  42. The AIDS crisis was still really bad.

    Gay and trans rights were nowhere to be seen, especially in media. In the early 90s mentioning a gay person on TV was a Big Deal. By the late 90s, it was ok to be gay on a network sitcom, but the thought of a straight person being mistaken for being gay was treated as a joke and the straight person was generally horrified by the implication.

  43. “Sagging”. I was at a homeless camp a while back and a occupant who was still living in the 90s was limping around with his pants close to his knees and one of the residents aid workers just looks me dead in the eyes and asks “Why?” Did not have a good answer.

  44. Columbine. One of the first major school shootings that AGAIN, could’ve been prevented

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