I'm a Boomer/Gen-X cusp person, and I've long felt the same way. History seems to have decided that the "go-go '80s" were this wild ride of prosperity, but all I saw was was recessions, budget slashing in every institution I had anything to do with — schools, government, every company I worked for — and the introduction of the concept of "homelessness" to describe the once-small cohort whose population had exploded. Also that was the decade when pensions stopped being a thing, and even those who HAD pensions, like autoworkers, had them stolen in bailouts.
@kingkaufman@housepanther Just a couple of years behind you. I remember a news article lamenting the drop in math scores (Rochester, MN is IBM and Mayo Clinic, so we had our standardized tests back then), about three years after our music ed budgets were decimated.
Add comment