I graduated high school in 1986. I attended a small Midwestern high school, not unlike many others of its day.
I believe that your most formative years are your years in high school. That is when your character is cemented.
Your trials and tribulations during this period are the training grounds for how all the remainder of your life's challenges will be met.
At the end of the eighties, we had real problems facing us. For one thing, we had all just recently survived the farm crash, the factory crash, and a giant recession. I remember the county I lived in had endured a trough of unemployment of 27%.
We also lived with the daily threat of total annihilating nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Every day our evening news was watched for information about our "enemy" who legitimately had the strength to deal us such a heavy nuclear blow that we would not ever fully recover.
Aids was also a burgeoning threat, there were no miracle cocktails, and there was little correct information at hand over what was likely to spread it and what wasn't. ( beyond mere blood and body fluid precautions) It was assumed that a single encounter with an "aids infected" or "HIV infected" woman would automatically lead to an aids death months later.
It seems that our two worlds (east and west) were kept in balance by the other. Our world of western privilege and advantage was a plate spinning on a stick, only kept in alignment by our nemesis' similar counter-rotating world.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, their world crumbled, and their own spinning plate of a universe bounded off into their own never land across the ocean, essentially unable to provide the political balance to our own world.
Our world of righteous beauty and plenty began to accelerate in political rotation until we also quickly became a "tilted universe" unto ourselves.
Everything we knew about good and bad, right and wrong fast became passe'. It seems we have left our own stable and logical world behind, only to live in a new and sick cartoon like plane of existence.
Our modern world resembles to me a "roger rabbit" like "toon town" of a dimension. The personal encounters of my daily life seem "fake and animated" and "unreal".
I am living in this tilted universe, this fake, creepy cartoon like dimension with only my 1986 character and strength to guide me and help me survive.
The children and young adults of our modern age, have not known any other plane of existence, and can't imagine what our "real world" was like. There is a serious generation gap between anyone that graduated from high school in or before 1986 and our chronological descendants.
America before the Soviet Collapse was both a gentler and more sophisticated time. We didn't have the large scale social decay or the Orwellian eye blinders of modern false liberalism to imprison us as our modern young people experience.
I have included a few 80's era music videos for you to enjoy, maybe it will take you back to your original dimension. Maybe for a few seconds you too can remember who you were when you had the promise of the future, and a little bit of your own innocence remaining.
Mike's Vacation
Indy- 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4J4M6BXDLs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pQOkLTdFo
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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