during mid 80s there was genuine concern about nuclear war; but a lot of Gen X blotted this out with alcohol and particularly drugs.

I don't recommend doing this - the rave era *was* a lot of fun, but there were quite a few casualties and the partying also distracted folk from making society better and the governments (particularly Europe in 1990s/00s) briefly turned a blind eye whilst they carried on with neoliberalism/capitalism, and then when it got too much clamped down hard with more prohibition, leaving a lot of bitter people who had to get sober quickly (but didn't really want to) and that is a big factor in why so many are turning to fascism..

GenX here. Worst it’s ever been for me as a CIS white man. During the Cold War while we were afraid of the Russian’s starting something, we never had doubts about our own country.

Now I’m sure if you ask some people of color they will tell you it’s been this bad for a long time and we are just opening our eyes since it now impacts us.

It seems bonkers to me that people want to "Make America Great Again", despite actively championing making it basically the worst it has ever been.

I guess they want to "return" to when they were children and didn't have to pay rent, or care about anything, and didn't have to care about who they hurt because they were kids? Idk.

Hello, Gen X here. I grew up in the UK following news and politics. We grew up assuming we’d either be blown up by the IRA or obliterated by a nuclear strike from the USSR.

At no point did I ever feel the existential dread that I feel when I look at the news today. Even at the worst of times growing up, there was still a sense that logic and reason would win out.

Today, I feel like something in society and rule of law has fundamentally, irreparably broken

I sometimes feel like this is the worst it's been in my lifetime, but I have to remind myself that my very young years are years I wasn't watching or reading the news and there were assassinations, KKK and other white supremacists killing folks, hijackings, Vietnam War, lots of other wars I'm sure, etc.

I think what folks who voted for Trump think "great" means probably varies across several demographics that voted for him. The ones who mirror the kind of awful shitbag he #USpol

[GenX] As a kid, I had a background "knowledge" that I'd die in nuclear fire. You get used to that. AIDS was terrifying when it arrived, right as we came to sexual maturity. In the early days, no one understood transmission, and there were no serious treatments.

That said, I'd never experienced the kind of dislocation I've felt since the first Trump admin. (It was only years later that I understood how vile Reagan was.)

Boomer here, age 68. For sheer terror, this present mess doesn't even begin to compare with the thermonuclear menace of the Cold War. Dictatorships can be reversed, and usually at MUCH less cost than for Nazi Germany. But once ICBMs are en route, what can you do?

For the same reason, there was another recent Republican presidential candidate who, had he been elected, would have frightened me far more than #Trump: the viciously xenophobic John "My fellow prisoners" #McCain, who hated Asians so much that he could easily have started the Third World War.

Yes, fear is an important part of my reaction to the Trump regime. But far more so, SHAME and DISGUST. Directed not only at Trump personally, but at every single one of my compatriots who has ever so much as considered supporting him.

I will also say that things felt pretty dire after 2004 for me. I thought that this Christian Nationalist juggernaut was going to be unstoppable at that point too. We got a brief reprieve but still are dealing with the consequences of SCOTUS and Federal Court picks he got to make in his second term. That said, here is what I wrote, typos and all, in an email to friends the day after the election. While it is somewhat prophetic it missed the timeline by a decade and the perpetrators within the right wing machine substantially. Despite how salty this reads I still had no inclination to cut any family or friends off for voting for it. I was just pissed about it. We crossed my final threshold on that with the November 2024 election. It's just too far beyond the pale now and now I have excised MAGA family/friends entirely and am still too raw about the unfolding chaos to be able to just play nice at social functions with "mere" Trump 2024 voters even if it is at all avoidable:

"Well the election is now over and we have four more years of the federal
government being run by the cabal of religious right and neo-conservative
Republicans. I'll simply warn those who didn't take the threat of these
people seriously that your saftey is not assured by being in "the right"
group. That group will continue to grow smaller and more selective as their
power grows. We had a chance to stop the onslaught of these people and we
chose not to. It isn't only our loss, it is a loss for the world. We even
handed them a Congress even more amenable to overturning the woman's right
to choose, willing to remove any semblence of civil liberties (for the ever
changing "undesirable" group anyway),e willing to merge church and state and
that will continue to turn over our economy over to a select few corporate
giants. It's sad to watch the world's greatest democratic experiment come
to such an untimely end, but unfortunately it has begun. May the world
forgive us for not stopping the juggernaut while we still had the chance.
I'll leave you with some words from a very wise man who was placed in a
similar situation 70 years ago: (Bishop Niemoller quote)"

I was 10 when the Cuban missile crisis happened. The world was definitely about to end. (My mom said we still had to go to school.)

What's different about now is that I always trusted my country to be on the right side of things. I wonder if I'll ever feel that way again.

I was just a kid in the 80s, but the threat of nuclear war was always in the back of my mind. An AIDS crisis I didn't fully understand (and realize now was much worse than I knew), Reagan's rhetoric and presence was a source of anxiety. Kind of an opposite to Mr. Rogers.

Despite all that, there was a sense that we could make progress to someplace better, and for a time I thought that was happening. I was naive.

Well, before the wall came down was the era of the unintentionally hilarious Protect and Survive leaflet, but I don't know whether anyone took it seriously. Other than perhaps as material for radio comedy shows. Nobody really believed that hiding under the kitchen table and sticking brown paper over the windows would save them from a nuclear attack.

The wall coming down was, in retrospect, an abnormal period of hope and optimism when we assumed things would continue getting better. You could argue that we're now back to situation normal as it was before. Only worse, because back then it was pretty well universally accepted that fascists were a Bad Thing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_…

public information series about domestic preparations for nuclear war

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

The period in the late 60's/early 70's was a bit worse. Assassinations, riots, raging Vietnam War, the government lying to & spying on the public, racism, John Birch Society, Watergate, resignation of Nixon, the oil price shocks & hyper inflation after the Iran hostage impasse. The "Greatest Generation" was not so great, then.

The "great again" period of the 50's is a desire to return to Jim Crow & exclusions based on race. Make America White Again.

Music WAS great, though.

• The entire Cold War - fallout shelters, "duck and cover", radioactive snow
• The Cuban Missile Crisis - my father, a Marine enlisted man, went to work one morning. By 6 pm my mother and I were convinced we would never see him again.
• Viet Nam - "Ain't no time to wonder why. Whoopee we're all gonna die!"
• 70s energy crisis - nobody had gasoline
• 79-81 Iran hostage crisis

Did I mention walking to school barefoot in the snow? The worst part was that it was uphill both ways.

We paid very little attention to nuclear annihilation. Accident was always the most likely cause and there would have been only a couple of hours of panic, with the end instant and painless. Plus, we had a lot of good things going on for us.

Nothing like this slowly maturing horror.

I came up in the later part of the cold war.

This is much worse.

Not least bc we've been watching it coming for decades, & nobody with the power to affect change has done jack-shit. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Unlike the cold war, when it at least felt like the TPTB would generally prefer to keep the population alive, now they seem laser focused on destroying everything.

Most of the 1960s, in general, seemed grim.

I vaguely remember adults talking about the Berlin wall, and was 5 when JFK was assassinated.

History...
Civil rights (ongoing, but many were killed along the way)
JFK, MLK, Jr., RFK 🪦
Vietnam
Body counts
Protests (Kent State)
Pollution (visible "air," and rivers that burned)
Richard Nixon
Henry Kissinger
The Bomb

Good things...
Vaccines for: polio, measles
Folk music
Motown
Protest music
Rock music
Laugh-In
The Smothers Brothers
cool art

1968 might well've felt nearly as bad, but I was only 3 so my recall of MLK & RFK being assassinated & Nixon's win being upsetting is a specific reflection of my family.
Watergate was bad but not doomy; it was clearly BEING HANDLED.
Reagan was a disaster but the incremental fear of global nuclear war he brought wasn't so huge & he was truly patriotic to a fault, rather than clearly out for personal gain.
GWB was like a nukeless Reagan echo.

So, no. I've not seen it this bad.

Bleak times. 1983.

Watched TV film, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da… , that depicted atomic war, from perspective of Americans in Kansas, watching in horror as American ICBMs launch. Then incoming Soviet ICBMs come in kill half of everyone, make survivors regret survival.

We watched, my fellow teen friends, then stumbled outside, half crying, shocked, despondent. We were doomed, super doomed, all doom and hopeless doominess.

My mumsy: "Oh, Murple! That was propaganda!"

Not wrong.

1983 film directed by Nicholas Meyer

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

GenX here, from Europe: We grew up with that constant threat of WWIII, of the Red Army coming, of nuclear annihilation. With Stings 'Russians' and movies like 'The day after'. We learned about 'Flexible response' at school.

But day to day we had other,.more closer sorrows: AIDS, Chernobyl.

And at the same time glimpses of hope, of a better future, like Live Aid and that whole futuristic experimental 80s music style (also Punk & No Future were fading into the past).

@thegibson You‘ve read about this „No Future“ generation in the 80s? Yes, that was real. We expected to die either in a hot flash or from fallout by someone making a mistake.

Today it‘s the realization that you may suffer because ~40% of the population would rather enjoy it or think it‘s in their best interest.

While the outcome in the 80s was more lethal, today is more disgraceful.

I'd say the mid-80s when Reagan was putting missiles into Europe against the will of the people living there in order to better threaten the USSR felt like life could end at any moment. I don't feel like the world will be obliterated now, just the way of life I enjoy will be wiped out.

It's a different kind of hopeless and doomed, but it felt much more tactile and day-to-day threatening.