The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.
Some of the nostalgia is misplaced, but this is true: In the 1990s, we believed — nearly every one of us — that we could and would make the world better, that this was achievable, and furthermore that we were well on the way to doing so. That core optimism pervaded everything, even the soi-disant “pessimistic” works of the era. Every media artifact was imbued with this spirit, ineluctably. Every movie, song, painting, poster, billboard and (even) Trapper Keeper. Everything.
There is no way to describe how different that felt, how variant from now where we believe collapse, catastrophe and calamity are absolutely inevitable. But I can tell you we were living in a different, better world.
And here’s a secret: One of the reasons so many claim to find nearly everything from that era “offensive” is the extreme foreignness of everyone’s belief system and affect from that era. It has nothing directly to do with anything actually objectionable in the sense the offended claim, but it’s hard to blame them because they have not the words nor the experience for what they feel. Rather, the offense is in the incompatibility of our current apocalypse-oriented sociocultural immune system with the more robust and bountiful possibilities from that time. This discordance elicits a sub rosa horror that rises to consciousness as an offense, indeed, though not the offense of the wrong word (which is its surface manifestation), but rather the grief of what has been irrecoverably lost, what has been foregone that could have been realized, what we all could have had.
This extended yawp of unrecognized grief is what we see now, and not just from those who were alive then and conscious of the zeitgeist. No — we all feel it. It pervades our bones, our minds. And as then it has echoed through all media, all we consume, and stains this era just as the optimism of the 1990s tinged that time’s entire nous and expression thereof with much brighter shades.