Curious. I was born in the mid-90s, so, theoretically, I shouldn’t remember enough to know this, but I do.
I also had a genuinely horrible childhood, in a reasonably isolated part of the Western world, so this ISN’T necessarily just “nostalgia”. Certainly I’m not nostalgic for my childhood. Not in that sense. Though… Adulthood is even lonelier, so who knows, subconsciously…
Anyway, Australia either side of the 2000 Olympics, was a place of significant optimism. Genuinely, I was just a kid, and I could feel it. Pop culture was at its peak. The music scene, in particular live, was excellent. Our “high brow” arts and culture scene had never been better. We still dominated in (mens, mostly) sports, and our film scene was flourishing (MI:2, Matrix Trilogy and Man of Steel were all made in Sydney, amongst a number of others). Children’s entertainment and TV was unbelievably good, as was animation. And guess what, almost none of this was in any way “woke” or PC. Fuck, even the FOOD, drink, restaurant and bar scene was better, which… Should not be the case. But it was…
Politics was less divisive. Far, far less. We had an openly conservative government, and yes, sure, there were issues. I do not agree with many things they did (refugees - Tampa and Children Overboard; indigenous rights; the environment; increasing the US military presence on Aus soil), but we had no idea how good we had it, back then.
Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived, largely, in some sort of relative “harmony”. No reparations, and yes, there were riots (Redfern, later Cronulla), but I went to school with a couple of Aboriginal girls, and, at least in my experience, and what I saw, people were just BETTER to each other, and that was before the woke “Apology to the Stolen Generations”, and before my country started to fall over itself to rename every place, and destroy every element of “white” culture, in the name of appeasement…
Like, in the Y2K, Indigenous AND non-Indigenous came together to celebrate Cathy Freeman winning the 400m. Not because she was an Abo, but because SHE WAS AUSTRALIAN. That would never happen now. Not in the same way. If there even ARE Indigenous sprinters of that caliber anymore. And I honestly don’t see that ever happening again. Not at Brisbane 2032. Perhaps never again.
Things just sort of… Worked. Happiness and life satisfaction levels were higher. People could actually afford to buy houses. Cities hadn’t yet ripped themselves apart to support rampant mass immigration, and our women hadn’t yet declared open slather on our men. And people still attended church, and the synagogue. There were less mosques, but less hate preachers, too. It just felt like… A better time.
No smart phones. Shitty computers. Slower internet. But we still had games like KOTOR, Battlefront 1942 and COD.
People still talked to one another, face to face. I literally lived and went to school with people from all different ethnic origins, from all over the world. And WE GOT ALONG.
Then, things went very wrong. Sometime around 2010-2012, as I was finishing school. Maybe after Occupy. Maybe not. Here, things had already been on the slide since at least the 2007 “Apology”, and the 2005 Cronulla race riots, though…
So, how was it in your country? Do you think it was objectively better, 15+ years ago..? If so, why? What has changed? And what do you think caused it all to go to shit, in such a short period of time?
I know “political correctness” had a wave in the 90s, but I seemingly missed all of that, at the time. Nonetheless, I do genuinely think that things, and society, were better at that time, and, like I said, there are objective measures that would seem to back that up. Which is just… Honestly scary.
Ironically your film scene (and Vancouver's in Canada) thrived as a result of a marked decline in the US film scene, as major cities in the US became prohibitively expensive to film in. As an Aussie and presumably an Aussie nationalist that's something you can be happy about, though as an American nationalist it's not something I'm happy about.
Beyond that it's hard to say. I was a child in the 90s and a young adult but not a financially independent one in the early 2000's, so my responsibilities were far fewer than they were later on. I will say there was a marked shift in attitude after the 2000 election and especially after 9/11. After Y2K came and went without any of the issues we thought might happen with the world's computer systems, there was a pretty strong optimism for the future that was destroyed on 9/11.
There were signs of that coming pessimism since you had things like the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999, when the far left was still pretending to care about globalization. And then of course after NAFTA was finalized in the early 90s you started to see factories get outsourced to Mexico, especially near the major border towns in Southern California and Southern Texas.
Some of the optimism came back in as the internet started becoming mainstream and computers became more powerful, and of course you had smart phones. That optimism pretty much died with the housing bubble bursting in 2008.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that when I watch old home movies from the late 80s and early 90s the demographics of my home town and neighborhood are very different than they are today. It was obvious and honestly surprising despite having been in these circles of the internet for some time.
Interesting about the “home movies” bit…
My hometown is small(ish), but has swelled by like 300% in a decade or so… Which, proportionally, is massive. That’s not from “natural increase”, obviously. It’s immigration.
On a run, recently, I went past a local derby (town vs town) down the road from my house… Out of a crowd of say, 1000, I saw maybe less than 20% white faces. Most there were Africans. Never mind the players, of course…
This, in a town that when I first moved here (pretty much exactly 20 years ago), would have been AT LEAST 80% white, with the biggest “minority” being (white) Dutch settlers and their descendants…
Crazy bloody times. :-/