The 1990s were how long ago?
My wife and I recently started watching “The West Wing” before going to bed at night. It’s our latest choice of TV series to stream, and it also happens to be one of the older ones we’ve dove into.
The first season aired in 1999, which is over 20 years ago now. Whenever I think about that fact, it takes awhile to sink in. To me, and many others of a certain age, the 1990s don’t seem like they were that long ago. But they were.
There’s living proof of this all around. They are the “kids” in their 20s who were born during the decade when I learned to drive, graduated from high school and then went away to college. In fact, my niece and nephew were born in 1999, and they can now legally drink alcohol and are about to enter their senior of college. This doesn’t seem possible, but it is.
I was born at the tail end of the 1970s, so for me, that decade is only “real” to me in the form of pop culture and news archives. I am well aware of Watergate, disco and gasoline shortages, but I didn’t live through any of it, so I can only rely on other people’s experiences to shed a light on what it was like to live at that time.
The same goes for the 1990s when it comes to the up-and-coming generation. I’m sure most of them have heard of Nirvana, dial-up modems and beepers, but they don’t really know what it’s like to watch music videos on MTV, wait five minutes for a webpage to load, and communicate without texting. In many ways, I feel sorry for them, as they never got to experience a world without social media. I also feel incredibly grateful that I didn’t attend high school and college during the age of Facebook and Twitter.
While watching the first few episodes of “The West Wing,” Linda and I have had some good laughs about things that are now noticeably outdated, such as the fashion choices and strangely sappy background music. Whenever you look back in time at old TV show and movies, everyone and everything tends to appear more innocent and naive. One of our biggest laughs came when one of the characters in the show emphasized the phrase “dot com” when referring to Amazon. Nowadays, even mentioning that part of a well-known website is a sign that you may have missed the past two decades.
Of course, time is relative, and I’m sure a lot of you are scoffing at me for waxing nostalgic about the ‘90s as if they were ancient history. The longer we’re lucky enough to live, the more years accumulate behind us, giving us a deeper appreciation of how much changes and much stays the same. If I wait another 10, 20 or 30 years, I’ll be even more shocked by how much time has passed and how the 2020s seem like a bygone era.
OUT FOR A WALK
KEVIN O’BRIEN
EDITOR
