I was born in the early nineties, which feels like forever ago now. I remember things like Princess Diana’s death and the events of 9/11. But what I remember more, even if it was slipping away with the old decade, I remember community. I remember neighbors coming over with cookies to welcome you when you first moved in, and chatting in each other’s yards. Dinner invites a few times a year and block parties for the 4th of July. Now some of that still happens in the small towns but it’s a dying light of hospitality, even in dear old Dixie where I dwell.

More than that though, the nineties children had the last touches of interpersonal relationships. If you wanted to watch a movie you didn’t own you had to truck yourself down to the local Blockbuster and rent it, or go to the library, or the best and least humiliating, borrow it from a friend. This of course meant you had something to discuss with your friend, and your friend had to trust you to not lose or damage their precious Disney VHS (because you’re like 10 at most, so what else are you going to be watching?) You had to interact with people, not just tap your mouse twice and sit in the silence of your room cut off from the world.

You also had to be so much closer to your family. One did not simply pull out their phone and log onto the internet, no, you had to wait your turn on the one or two devices in the house that could access the internet, and if you lived through the dial-up days you probably lost more round of Minesweeper than you’d care to remember while you waited, prayed, and crossed your fingers that it would log on, just so you could MSN Messenger with your peeps. Then of course you’d have to share said internet with mom, dad, the incidental sibling, which while it lead to frustration and hot tempers, it also made you responsible and considerate, albeit usually of a necessity. Mom and dad being the rulers of the castle and if they needed on you had to get off, which meant you simply found times, like when mom was at Yoga class or dad was at the Golf Course to binge your internet and play some Runescape. You also had to make sure you didn’t run over the monthly allowance, another lesson in responsibility. And if you and your siblings weren’t as tentious as me and mine, it meant you learned to share.

Now every person has at least two or more devices to tap into the internet whenever they like. Of course that means less fights, but it also means less communication. There’s no “mom can I have the internet at five to talk to Steve?” and there’s no sharing. I remember, for all our fights, my brother and I playing Runescape together. Truthfully it was more me watching him, and asking questions, but now everyone has their own space and interacts more with online friend or friends from outside the internet online, then personal, face to face conversation.

There was also more safety. Less riots and violence and more community. There was no knockout game, we just worried about knocking out the neighbor’s window with a stray ball. The senseless violence done out of restless boredom didn’t exist for us (well maybe in isolated cases, but there’s always been those. We knew right and wrong, we still loved our country. There was a delightful innocence, much like that of the 50’s as opposed to the 60’s. We were a generation after war but before the next one. There was an idyllic feeling that war wasn’t a thing any longer. Well until we sat at our TV’s and watched the World Trade Centers crumble on the news day after day. Only to be replaced by the video of Sadam Hussein’s statue toppling as America went to war again. And just like the Vietnam war that shattered the innocence of that generation, so too did the war in Iraq. A war we saw continue with little purpose. It is for this reason, this disenchantment with our lives after such a placid youth, that we, the 90’s kids, have morphed into we the Millennials who complain and disrespect our country but seek to do very little about actually improving it.

But for all that it has been an era of wonder and terror that we’ve grown up in. Technology increases, and with it, man’s ability to ruin himself, but also to heal. We’ve watched our VHS’s be gradually replaced by DVD’s. Our cassette tapes sit in nostalgic boxes in the attic, along with our innocence and belief that the world was the best it had been. The Walkmans and Furbies decompose in the junkyard and we spend our money on better phones and long for the days of Legos and dodgeball. We yearn for our childhood, when things were wholesome, or more so, we see the decline and we either try to integrate into it, or fight it and stand outside as our generation and the one following it slide by down the waste heap into moral relativism and disenchantment.

The lack of technology may make it seem like the dark ages to a lot of people, but it was pretty great and I’d trade the music from now for the music then any day. Even Nickelback (who I personally still enjoy in small doses) beats the snot out of Justin Bieber, and the Goo Goo Dolls can still a pull a crowd. Days before the iPod (which is now almost extinct itself) were days of one on one interaction. Days when Movie Gallery stood tall in it’s glory and you would wait for discount days to rent your movies. When the worst thing a child could endure was the player “eating” the VHS tape. When Walkman CD players were THE gadget to have, and big bulky headphones like you’d see on a DJ these days were the cool ones to wear and not earbuds. When our generation had innocence and hope instead of disillusionment and fatalism. if you think us nineties kids are always crying in our Crush soda about the good old days, remember, our good old days were the last of their kind and they were pretty frickin’ rad!