5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong

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I fear for the newest generation. Their only problems are rampant unemployment, a violent authoritarian movement, and the 2018 Ebola Plague. They were never forged in the fires of the 1990s, forced to survive in the wild with a beeper and a mere three choices of hamburger chain.Fact is, if you endured the '90s, you can make it through anything. To go outside in that decade was to step into a dreary world of flannel and coffee. The only thing not trying to kill you was Rage Against the Machine, but their idea of music was to saw through baling wire with a nail file. Not even your bleeding ears could distract you from the worst problems of the decade.

#5.
Communism

What was scary about it

Back in the day, the nuclear powerhouses were in constant struggle over how to destroy the middle class. Nobody wanted war, but if millions didn't die, how would we prove whose ideology was right? Kids today only fear nuclear apocalypse for fun, but in the early '90s, these were the ways we calculated ourselves dying:

CHILDREN'S 1990 RQTECTIONS OF 1991 CASSDALTIES 39% bDOM! (falling bomb 23% whistle) Radiation poisoning, now in stra W berry flavor 2% Crushedbeneath

You have to assume some of the mutants are friendly, though.

We were so scared of nuclear war our superheroes had radioactive origins just so we could pretend toxic immersion would be okay.

TEENAGE WTURTLESL MUTANTNINJA 7 JOIN us IN THE THE ONLY THAT'S WHEN SEWER FOR PIZZA RULE 1s YOU CAN'T WE DEVOUR YOU AND SKATEBOARDING, TELL YOUR PAREN

Actual sewer-dwelling reptiles love children for a very different reason

Making things worse

Superpowers were a priority for kids in the '80s, because our Russian foes were strong like bear. The only Soviet super-athletes not killing our movie champions in unsportsmanlike conduct were defecting here to steal huge scholarships from underprivileged chess-playing computers. This paranoia was red hot by the '90s! It wasn't till shortly after the Berlin Wall fell that we realized they were but pawns of the Soviet state, thanks to the attitude-changing documentary Gym-Kata 2: Ring Around the Russkie.

It turned out okay, though

Communism was an empty threat by the mid-'90s, but the psychological damage was done. To this day, Americans fear sharing. That, in turn, means more money to fill the emptiness in our lives with mercantile goods! Wooooo! I'ma buy me a jetski! I thank my God I'm a 'Merican!
#4.
AIDS

What was scary about it

Did you have sex after 1989? Holy condoms, Batman, you have AIDS! When you got done watching TV in the '90s, you knew two things: all clothes should be be denim, and two virgins having premarital sex causes AIDS. HIV is not just a mere thing like a deadly pandemic. That bastard hates everything fun in life, like sex, heroin, and taking other people's blood. It also hates good music, dropkicking Freddie Mercury but leaving hair bands (margarine to glam rock's butter) free to screech their way into their own VH1 shows.

MOTLEY CRUE SHOUT AT THE DEVIL

Thank heaven we finally found a cure for Vince Neil

Once musicians realized the disease was gunning for the best part of rock stardom, they fought back with the fury of a Tea Partier reading a history book. Madonna selflessly sacrificed her body on countless penises to show how risky that kind of behavior would be without her alien physiology. Non-stop campaigns educated the public about Bono's lab findings, including:

-AIDS is responsible for more cases of Very Special Episode than racism and bullying combined.

-You can contract HIV just by looking if you lean so close to the virus your eye touches it.

-HIV doesn't spread by hugging, unless the person is inside-out.

-They say you can't get HIV by kissing, but we're going to prove them wrong.

-We all die alone.

Eventually rock surrendered and became grunge, a music completely devoid of sex unless it was between two depressed flies on a rotting nectarine. That's why most alternative music videos look like rain spoiled your church's Salvador Dali-themed orgy.

HEY, Look- --ART.

Be careful. She might give you HIV

The only human beings who had sex that decade were Eazy-E and Sharon Stone. Eazy died a week after finding out his sore throat was actually-woah, AIDS! The only thing Ms. Stone got was an Oscar. You know what that means? HIV decided Sharon Stone was a little too intense for it to commit to.

Making things worse

dd

That's what the '90s were about, kids. Big hair, mom jeans and sex you'd have to die with a sword in your hand to taste.Trying to remain celibate, our country crossed its legs and endured maximum Cindy Crawford. If you turned on MTV in 1992 and didn't gaze directly upon her glory, you got Denis Leary trying to rant his way into her (denim) underwear with comedy. Which never works, am I right, TV's Gillian Jacobs?

NOT ONCE, NOT EVER. NOT EVEN A LITTLE. UIRTSIIT NERG Britta Perry burn bonus! +1000 points! GOHLAE
NBC.com

Women can't resist you when you mention them in an essay on AIDS

Your silence only proves my point. Every day of the '90s was a high-stakes tease by The Most Beautiful Woman in The World, bait-and-switched for a lingering, burning death. My entire pubescence was spent running from Pepsi ads with condoms stuffed in my ears.

It turned out okay, though

At its outer rim, the judicious use of sex-parts is fairly low-risk. And before you take that as advice, remember that I'm drunk right now. Not while I'm writing this, but every time you read it. Regardless, if you wear condoms and have the foresight not to be born in Botswana, you could theoretically have a better chance of becoming an astronaut. And when you get to space, there's no HIV there, so enjoy that zero-gravity sex. Be sure to film it. I need something new in my porn.
#3.
The internet

What was scary about it

I don't want to spoil your notions of technological superiority, but in the time it takes you to read this sentence, the 1993 internet could upload your entire brain into a castle made of green grids using a 2400 baud modem. We capitalized it as Internet, and offered burnt sacrifices, for it was our god. You could hack a computer through the electrical outlet, and the smartest computers (2 gigs memory, 512mb RAM, and a pickle on the side because those are delicious) learned to control electrical appliances that had no circuitry at all, as seen in every movie about hackers except Hackers, which may have included that plot point, but absolutely no one saw.

Making things worse

"The 'net" as it was called by "cybersurfers" on the "world wide web" was a "dangerous" "place." Every week we had to fight off a Skynet or a Lawnmower Man with virtual reality gyroscopes, and you never knew when you'd be plagued by horrifying visions of dancing babies that weren't quite human. It was awesome, until Furries found others like themselves.


I don't know an acceptable way of suggesting a baby be struck dead

It turned out okay, though

Then, in 1995, teen boys discovered something amazing! Science proved the existence of a woman on the internet! Her name was Cindy Margolis, and her clothes were off. The series of tubes known as the interweb shifted its focus to sex. Ever since, kids no longer scavenge porno from dad's closet, or in my case, hobo campgrounds.
#2.
Conspiracy theories

What was scary about it

We'd tried paranoia in the '70s, pitting men with terrible haircuts against corrupt factions within government. By the '90s evil overlords were the entire government, or at least our TV government, which the average American is more informed about. X-Files explained that we were to trust no one except Gillian Anderson.

5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong

I don't want to live in a world where you can't trust redheads

Making things worse

By the time the FDA classified The X-Files as a sedative, people were reading conspiracies in between the lines of their Alpha-Bits -- or they would have if they weren't confident that pouring milk full of bovine growth hormone into their bowl wasn't exactly what the New World Order wanted. It got so you couldn't distinguish gnostic fact from covered-up fiction. When you have no way of filtering out crap, you start blaming local cable news stories on Zeta Reticulans time-funneling technology to the CIA/NSA composite Project Aquarian. That's why today we go beyond conspiracy theories that lay bare a chilling truth we want to deny, and go straight to making up things we want to believe. For example: when President Obama took office, a lot of people insisted he was on the brink of taking away America's guns. Obviously that hasn't happened, because I'm still packing heat everywhere -- at work, the bar, and especially to football games where my team is losing. Now for the twist ending: What if Obama does confiscate our guns, but replaces them with cake?

5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong
Cake Wrecks

The downshot is it's not a very good cake

It turned out okay, though

When the government decided to bypass the Constitution, they didn't even half try to hide it, and unless you were a terrorist, or had the same name as a terrorist, or came from the same region as a terrorist, your life went on the same, but secretly recorded without a warrant. Basically, they were doing your Facebooking for you.
#1.
The environment

What was scary about it

We were told that if we didn't recycle, every day of our lives would be like the movie 2012: expensive, overwrought, and deadly boring.

5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong

Perhaps incredibly so

There would be nowhere to live, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide - I'm still talking about
2012. They promoted that film so hard you'd think it had taken their daughters hostage. As a child I actually saw a public service ad set in the future, in which Niagara Falls ran out of water because people wouldn't stop using water. An entire team wrote, filmed, edited and broadcast an ad that didn't understand how rain works, or assumed future societies would trough up in Canada.

Making things worse

Not crapping in your nest should be apolitical. Unfortunately, hippies can overshadow any good cause with their unbearable stink of idiocy (as well as their more literal stink). If a hippie had prosecuted the Nuremberg Trials, everyone would find themselves thinking to their momentary horror how sharp the Nazis' haircuts looked. There, I just pulled off a reverse-Godwin for irrefutable victory. Suddenly, the term "tree-hugger" got thrown at any one who suggested keeping the stuff we like around. The Religious Right
even said God would prefer it if we tapped Earth dry in a generation or two, since Jesus is coming back in our lifetime.

Jita S

Just not Falwell's

It turned out okay, though

The threat is over now that we have cheap, renewable energy sources, like...like...

5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong

Oh shit

So yeah, you're screwed. But at least there's this:

5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong

Wooden teeth, steel abs. And the teeth come out.



Brendan McGinley writes comics, though nothing x-treme enough for the '90s.

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