More "largely peaceful" Portland protests

[Von Cichlid]

(08-16-2020, 08:57 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: So, this was a fun response for me to read because I was a punk rock kid in the late-nineties through the aughts. I came of age during this era and we cared a lot about where the weed, beer, and chicks were. It's always funny for me to think back to this time because I was an Eagle Scout, a gamer nerd, and a punk rock kid all in one package. But on top of all of that I was an activist, even back then.

Punk is protest music. Living the punk rock life is a protest in itself. We cared about social justice, we cared about climate change, we cared about unjust wars. Fat Mike put out the Rock Against Bush tours for a reason. When every generation comes of age there are cultures within it that care about these things. What we're seeing now is more about a greater societal shift, but rest assured that the youth in the nineties were out there caring about this stuff while getting high as shit and ***** their partners.

If you cared about unjust wars, I'd wager you were a late teen in the early 2000's?  I looked it up and the "Rock Against Bush Tour" was in 2004.

The social climate in the USA was vastly different in the mid to late 90's versus the mid 2000's. 
 
The only mainstream really political band that was popular at that time that I can remember was Rage Against the Machine.  By 2004 every mainstream band was political to some degree.  

I graduated high school in 1997, and it was a fairly large one with 2000 people or so.  The demographics consisted of jocks, stoners, ganstas (Tupac vs. Biggie was huge at the time), some metal heads, and grits is what we called the country music people.  There was not much of a punk scene that I can remember.  I mean, a few kids wore Misfits and Dead Kennedy's shirts but that was about it.

Nobody cared about unjust wars because there was no unjust wars at that time.  From 1992 until 9/11, the US was a complacent nation in large part.  OJ Simpson and Monica Lewinsky were the biggest things to come out of that 8 year stretch.  The mid to late 90's was pre-internet and people just did not think in the same "global" way that they do now.  People lived in their little bubbles when you compare to the way we live in the information age.

That complacency is what allowed 9/11 to happen largely, and we have not been the same world since.

By the time the invasion of Iraq happened I was already out of the Army and by that point my views were pretty conservative.  Maybe there were not many leftist view points in the military for me to learn from.  I don't even think I learned what left and right politics were until I went to college in 2002.  That's how off the radar that stuff was to people my age and in my area at the time.

Had I had grown up in a different region and in a different time things probably would have been different.