If you are reading this then there is a fairly high probability that you were a teen in the eighties and survived to tell about it. If so then you were born in the late sixties or early seventies and most likely just barely remember the fall of Saigon in April 1975 that signalled the end of the war in Vietnam and the first of the major events that would shape our generation.
I consider myself fortunate to have entered the eighties with an extremely large number of functioning brain cells for if not, I would surely be a vegetable today. As much as our parents wreaked havoc on the "establishment" in the fifties and sixties, we made the nineteen eighties historically memorable for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. Those "Classic Rock" stations that fill the radio waves today are broadcasting mostly tunes from 1978 to 1991 because it is still some of the best rock ever recorded. Television and film were completely transformed during that decade as were the audiences who consumed them. It was the decade that saw the birth of the personal computer, the collapse of apartheid, and the dawn of a new age in realism. We invented "Grunge", re-invented "Punk", and developed an entire culture around the new concept of "video games" like PacMan and Space Invaders.
The title of this piece is a bit of a mis-label. Aside from a few purple-haze filled months in 1982, I can actually remember most of my teen years and from what I recall it was a blast. We saw the last of the drive-in theatres pass into history, but not without first experiencing Heavy Metal, Cheech and Chong, and War Games on those big outdoor screens long before iMax and Surround Sound. We were the first to have personal portable music in the form of the "WalkMan" and started the whole music copyright controversy. The fees we paid for our theatre passes fuelled geniuses like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to completely reinvent the film industry with revolutionary works like Star Wars and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
I also remember the fall of the Berlin wall in November of 1989 as clearly as if it was yesterday. With that we saw the beginning of end of the "Eastern Block" and a new era of nation building in Europe. Our generation witnessed the first flight of the Space Shuttle and saw the beginning of what would become the commercialization of space. I remember Black Monday (October 19th 1987), the largest one-day stock market crash in history that saw company values cut in half over night and like many others my age, gained a healthy appreciation for careful financial planning.
It was the end of the cold war and the beginning of the energy crisis. We redefined everything from education to politics to religion. Our music spawned a new level of global communication and social awareness. Student movements rose and challenged governments around the world to listen to the people's voice. Silicon enabled us to explore worlds that only existed previously in our imaginations, and we created them on Commodore 64s and Atari 2600s.
If you read this and you relate, then make sure your kids know....
We are Generation-X and we changed the world.
