That was peak America. It all started going to shit just after that decade ended.

I knew bad people existed, just didn’t think evil and chaos was so widespread, that good prevailed over evil and evil was contained, not rampant.

Even if there were times where it might have been "saner" in the US, there's always crazy stuff going on somewhere in the world.

I've been around since Ike was president. There have been some terrible things over the decades. In some ways, this era surpasses the year 1968, or the 1968-69 insanity. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Charlie Manson wasn't president -- not even once, much less twice.

The civil rights movement and the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, the Edmund Pettis Bridge march, MLK's I Have A Dream speech, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Chicago convention, race riots, Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate, events I remember quite clearly. It seemed like things were falling apart then, too.

Determined to destroy our country.

Sadly, much of the world around us was not.

And scoundrels and wars and secrets...always.

But there has never been a Felon, Rapist, Traitor in the Whitehouse and an entire party that us A-okay with that.

I remember going weeks and months on end without worrying if the President would do something crazy, or illegal, or deadly.
I spent many relatively happy years assured that my democracy would not collapse.

This is entirely different. Half of our fellow citizens have no moral compass.
MAGA is a deranged death cult. We don't have a Trump problem... We have a GOP problem...and pull back a little more...we have a Billionaire problem.

THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. Totally different animal.

JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam, Watergate.

The only thing that saved me then was the music and the moon landing.

a billy club by a cop simply because I had long hair in 72, crazy economic times in the 70s, , 80s dominated by a senile actor, watched Christianity take over politics in the 90s (Falwell and Newt Gingrich, and since 2000 the US has been in big time decline.

The biggest difference these days is news 24/7 and social media. Back in the day we usually watched the evening news or read a newspaper. These days it is a constant bombardment of propaganda and indoctrination. Sucks.

I was an American kid in England, I was SO PROUD of my country, so proud. Now it's.........well......

fucked up.

here’s a theme song for ya:

From birth to the Cuban Missile Crisis and 1975 to when Reagan took over were halcyon years where there were relatively no stressful events in the country and the world, at least for me. And that's it. (But then again, I was up North, not in the Jim Crow South.)

I was a teenager in the '90s and it seemed much better than fears of being nuked in the '80s.

Vietnam death counts on the nightly news. The tail end of Duck and Cover at the elementary schools. Real fear of nuclear Armageddon.

The world was in more danger then - maybe.

But I think the USA is in more danger now.

Standards, norms, and structures that might have been bent or occasionally ignored before are now being destroyed and discarded right and left. Institutions built over the decades of the post-WWII era are being gutted. We are losing allies and influence worldwide and we may never get them back, or at least not fully and not soon.

Even from a historical perspective I think this is getting Red Scare bad, hopefully not Great Depression or Civil War bad, at least not yet.

But in my lifetime, I think this is the worst.

Economy was great, Cold War was over, the music, television and movies were good, and there was a general sense of optimism. People were slowly beginning to open up to be more tolerant. Environmental awareness was on the rise. Computer technology was on the rise but it hadn’t completely taken over things yet.

That the entire country got caught up in things that were essentially tabloid fodder (OJ, Monica Lewinsky) demonstrates how little else we had to be concerned as a whole and we could afford those distractions.

Now, there were places elsewhere in the world where the 90s were not so great…the Balkans and Rwanda immediately stand out.

But from an American perspective I don’t know if we ever had it any better than the 90s.