I get the same feeling whenever anyone talks about how bad crime is these days.
I hit my teen years during peak crime. Five of the kids I went to high school with were arrested for murder before we graduated. I got shot at a few times (never hit, but a guy standing next to me got hit). I had stuff stolen. I got jumped once. I knew Crips and Bloods, and had some run-ins with them (resolved peacefully).
One time after work I called a cab because I was tired and didn’t feel like walking home and the cabbie freaked out when I told him where I was going, said he would never go to that neighborhood again because last time he got robbed. I said “cool, just drop me at the store outside the neighborhood and I’ll walk from there.” and gave him a really good tip. He looked nervous the whole time, but did it. As I was walking in, I had to walk around some people fighting in the apartment building’s parking lot.
And when people today talk about how bad crime is, when it’s at 50% the rate it was then, all I can think is “Where were you for like the past 50 years? Under a rock?”
Back in those days, you had to lock the door as you came in. Nowadays, it’s been 20+ years since I can even remember locking the door when anyone’s home and awake. Only if we’re all asleep or out.
But still, the '90s were some of my best memories. Good times. Crime was double what it is now back then, and more violent, but they were happy days. Tech was booming. The dot-com crash and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. It was rough daily but optimistic for the future.
And yeah, seeing all the kids posting “Are we going to have WWIII soon?” just makes me laugh as someone who was raised during the Cold War era. They have no idea what the tension was like back then.
Or how each of us had that discussion with our dad saying “Son, you’d best pick a branch and specialty now, and be prepared to volunteer for it. Because if you volunteer, you might get it, but if you get drafted, you’ll just be sent in as cannon fodder.” and having to think and choose something like “Nuclear attack submarine officer/crewman, so I’ll be somewhere in an unknown location safe under the ocean when the warheads drop, and won’t have to be the one firing them.” and then studying for that.
But yeah, the '80s were great too. Cold War was raging, economy was shit, but there was hope you could be a successful yuppie Wall Street raider, and you had a plan for WWIII.
These days are objectively better on most metrics, but people just latch onto all the fearbait headlines. And don’t really seem to be looking optimistically to the future.