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Al Cowlings drives a white Ford Bronco down a Los Angeles freeway while O.J. Simpson, wanted for a double murder, sits in the back. A cameraman in a helicopter above captures the low-speed chase for posterity.
It’s an image as iconic of the 1990s as the moon landing was of the ‘60s or Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game is of today.
“Who’s O.J. Simpson?” Zayley asks.
“If he was running from the cops, why did he pull in at his house?” the quintessentially pragmatic Pfeiffer chimes in.
Then Julia, “So, back in YOUR day, if you wanted aerial video, you had to go up there and get it yourself, huh? That’s crazy.”
Our eldest daughter’s disturbing comfort with today’s Big Brother-style surveillance of daily life notwithstanding, watching this ‘90s documentary on Hulu as a family over the weekend proved educational for parents and children alike.
The girls marveled at the prevalence of VHS tapes and camcorders. They scoffed at the idea you couldn’t just binge-watch whatever you wanted on demand. Children who live in a world where cryptocurrency is a thing regarded with disbelief the notion that grown people spent hundreds of dollars on Beanie Babies in hopes their value would appreciate. In fairness, I thought that was pretty stupid when it was happening. Then again, plenty of my money went toward Pogs, hacky sacks and baseball cards.
With each question, Amelia and I felt increasingly like museum exhibits carted out for these children’s amusement. The ‘90s weren’t that long ago, were they?
For our part Amelia and I were taken aback by how little they knew about history or even the recent past. And that’s with us trying to teach them – through books, music, movies or talking about historic events in context.
While our three girls aren’t quite this bad, both Amelia and I have encountered kids, teenagers even, who have asked us if we “grew up in the ‘50s” because evidently “the 1900s” all went down in about 18 months.
That’s scary because it shows how pervasive the idea has become that the past has no value, nothing to teach us and should be dismissed as old and irrelevant.
Watching that documentary this weekend naturally awakened feelings of nostalgia for me. I once lived in a time before the internet and social media ruined everything, when families enjoyed appointment TV together and people weren’t constantly staring at their phones.
That got me thinking of another dangerous trap – lionizing a mythological past.
You hear it all the time from Boomers. The ‘50s and ‘60s were “the greatest.” People knew their neighbors, played outside, left their doors unlocked, etc. Things were built to last.
Nevermind, of course, segregation, lynchings, the Vietnam War, the Cold War more generally.
It’s easy for me to think about the ‘90s very much like my parents view their heyday. My childhood was pretty great, and my life didn’t become too challenging until the mid-aughts, when the electric bill in the mailbox started bearing my name.
But Rodney King didn’t have it so good in the ‘90s, neither did a lot of women, especially in the workplace. Race and poverty issues were far from fixed, even if we thought they were. Scandal abounded. Shows like Jerry Springer’s existed for a reason.
I guess, in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
But in another way, the ‘90s might have been the last full decade for collective awareness. Even as a child, I at least somewhat followed the news of the day because we watched, read and talked about it together as a family, with our neighbors, at church and in public.
Even as opinions varied, most folks operated from a larger slate of accepted facts. The images we saw were real, for the most part. People didn’t worry as much about deep fakes, and AI-generated content was science fiction.
Conspiracy theories mostly came from anarchists who bought things from militia catalogs, and respectable folk stayed away from those people. Few argued about who “actually” won the previous presidential election, and as bad as a lot of conservatives hated the Clintons, I never heard anyone back then claim they were lizards who eat children (Thanks, Q’Anon).
Now everything is everywhere all the time, and nothing is universally accepted as true. People can curate their “realities” any way they wish and immerse in them fully. And if the present can be anything you want, who cares about the past, right?
Zack Plair is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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