[rvense]

Lenin supposedly said "There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen."

I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of apparent progress and optimism, and just how big a change the September 11 attacks were. She remembers them of course, but not as a point of abrupt change. She did not become politically aware until some time after, when the war of terror was in full swing.

There's a bit in Coupland's Generation X where one of the main characters talks about remembering the Vietnam war being constantly in the news until one day it just disappeared, but his little not remembering it at all, to him it was just history. It feels kind of like that, in the inverse, in a way.

[sklargh]

My spouse and I have both reflected on our 90s childhoods as periods of functional non-history.

[Telemakhos]

Is a period of relative peace (except for the first Gulf War, the Yugoslavian conflict, etc.) and prosperity non-history? Is a time more historical the worse it feels, just like an event is more worthy of news coverage the more death or suffering it causes? What a terrible thing history must be if it is only the story of pain.

[philistine]

Serious people, after the fall of Communism, expected this to be the end of history. Turns out it was just a boring epilogue.