5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong
I fear for the newest generation. Their only problems are rampant unemployment, a violent authoritarian movement, and the 2018 Ebola Plague. They were never forged in the fires of the 1990s, forced to survive in the wild with a beeper and a mere three choices of hamburger chain.Fact is, if you endured the '90s, you can make it through anything. To go outside in that decade was to step into a dreary world of flannel and coffee. The only thing not trying to kill you was Rage Against the Machine, but their idea of music was to saw through baling wire with a nail file. Not even your bleeding ears could distract you from the worst problems of the decade.
What was scary about it
Back in the day, the nuclear powerhouses were in constant struggle over how to destroy the middle class. Nobody wanted war, but if millions didn't die, how would we prove whose ideology was right? Kids today only fear nuclear apocalypse for fun, but in the early '90s, these were the ways we calculated ourselves dying:
You have to assume some of the mutants are friendly, though.
Actual sewer-dwelling reptiles love children for a very different reason
Making things worse
It turned out okay, though
Communism was an empty threat by the mid-'90s, but the psychological damage was done. To this day, Americans fear sharing. That, in turn, means more money to fill the emptiness in our lives with mercantile goods! Wooooo! I'ma buy me a jetski! I thank my God I'm a 'Merican!What was scary about it
Did you have sex after 1989? Holy condoms, Batman, you have AIDS! When you got done watching TV in the '90s, you knew two things: all clothes should be be denim, and two virgins having premarital sex causes AIDS. HIV is not just a mere thing like a deadly pandemic. That bastard hates everything fun in life, like sex, heroin, and taking other people's blood. It also hates good music, dropkicking Freddie Mercury but leaving hair bands (margarine to glam rock's butter) free to screech their way into their own VH1 shows.
Thank heaven we finally found a cure for Vince Neil
Once musicians realized the disease was gunning for the best part of rock stardom, they fought back with the fury of a Tea Partier reading a history book. Madonna selflessly sacrificed her body on countless penises to show how risky that kind of behavior would be without her alien physiology. Non-stop campaigns educated the public about Bono's lab findings, including:
-AIDS is responsible for more cases of Very Special Episode than racism and bullying combined.
-You can contract HIV just by looking if you lean so close to the virus your eye touches it.
-HIV doesn't spread by hugging, unless the person is inside-out.
-They say you can't get HIV by kissing, but we're going to prove them wrong.
-We all die alone.
Eventually rock surrendered and became grunge, a music completely devoid of sex unless it was between two depressed flies on a rotting nectarine. That's why most alternative music videos look like rain spoiled your church's Salvador Dali-themed orgy.
Be careful. She might give you HIV
Making things worse
Women can't resist you when you mention them in an essay on AIDS
It turned out okay, though
What was scary about it
I don't want to spoil your notions of technological superiority, but in the time it takes you to read this sentence, the 1993 internet could upload your entire brain into a castle made of green grids using a 2400 baud modem. We capitalized it as Internet, and offered burnt sacrifices, for it was our god. You could hack a computer through the electrical outlet, and the smartest computers (2 gigs memory, 512mb RAM, and a pickle on the side because those are delicious) learned to control electrical appliances that had no circuitry at all, as seen in every movie about hackers except Hackers, which may have included that plot point, but absolutely no one saw.Making things worse
I don't know an acceptable way of suggesting a baby be struck dead
It turned out okay, though
Then, in 1995, teen boys discovered something amazing! Science proved the existence of a woman on the internet! Her name was Cindy Margolis, and her clothes were off. The series of tubes known as the interweb shifted its focus to sex. Ever since, kids no longer scavenge porno from dad's closet, or in my case, hobo campgrounds.What was scary about it
I don't want to live in a world where you can't trust redheads
Making things worse
By the time the FDA classified The X-Files as a sedative, people were reading conspiracies in between the lines of their Alpha-Bits -- or they would have if they weren't confident that pouring milk full of bovine growth hormone into their bowl wasn't exactly what the New World Order wanted. It got so you couldn't distinguish gnostic fact from covered-up fiction. When you have no way of filtering out crap, you start blaming local cable news stories on Zeta Reticulans time-funneling technology to the CIA/NSA composite Project Aquarian. That's why today we go beyond conspiracy theories that lay bare a chilling truth we want to deny, and go straight to making up things we want to believe. For example: when President Obama took office, a lot of people insisted he was on the brink of taking away America's guns. Obviously that hasn't happened, because I'm still packing heat everywhere -- at work, the bar, and especially to football games where my team is losing. Now for the twist ending: What if Obama does confiscate our guns, but replaces them with cake?
The downshot is it's not a very good cake
It turned out okay, though
What was scary about it
We were told that if we didn't recycle, every day of our lives would be like the movie 2012: expensive, overwrought, and deadly boring.
Perhaps incredibly so
Making things worse
Not crapping in your nest should be apolitical. Unfortunately, hippies can overshadow any good cause with their unbearable stink of idiocy (as well as their more literal stink). If a hippie had prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials, everyone would find themselves thinking to their momentary horror how sharp the Nazis' haircuts looked. There, I just pulled off a reverse-Godwin for irrefutable victory. Suddenly, the term "tree-hugger" got thrown at any one who suggested keeping the stuff we like around. The Religious Right even said God would prefer it if we tapped Earth dry
Just not Falwell's
It turned out okay, though
The threat is over now that we have cheap, renewable energy sources, like...like...
Oh shit
Wooden teeth, steel abs. And the teeth come out.
Brendan McGinley writes comics, though nothing x-treme enough for the '90s.
