More "largely peaceful" Portland protests

[Belsnickel]

(08-16-2020, 10:07 PM)Von Cichlid Wrote: 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.



    

(08-16-2020, 10:53 PM)samhain Wrote: I graduated high school in 95.  You really had to stretch to find causes to get riled up about back then.  A lot of far left types got upset about some of the things Clinton did, but it wasn't really a consistent thing.  The mid 90s was a pretty great time looking back.  People could get decent jobs, the economy was good, 9-11 hadn't happened, and politics were not yet to the divisive point they've arrived at now.  The closest thing to rioting you'd see were the WTO protests, which were usually pretty brief and it's participants were of the extreme anarchist variety.  

Cincinnati went through a pretty rough period after the cops killed Timothy Thomas in 2001.  He was a 19 year old that got shot in the back while running away.  Violence in the streets surged and businesses vacated downtown for a decade.  Hardly anyone went there to drink or hang out anymore.  Covington and Newport (Kentucky) gained a lot of bar business.  It took a long time and a lot of investment to get it to where it is now.

Yeah, there was a lot more going on than y'all realized. I was talking with my sister, born in 1975, graduated high school in '93 and college in '96, and discussing this conversation. My sister was also an activist during her youth for things like social justice, unjust wars (did you know we've only had something like 21 years without armed conflict in the entirety of this nation's history?), etc. This stuff was going on, it's just a higher percentage of people are plugged into it these days than they were before the internet became such a commonplace tool.