As someone who was a teenager in the 90s, I kind of looked with romantic nostalgia for something I never personally experienced to the 50s and 60s. The 50s because it was portrayed in popular media and film (see Back To The Future and Stand By Me, for example) as this era of lost innocence and simplicity. The 60s because of the social and political revolution that took place then and wishing I could have been part of it.

Looking back now, I’m not sure someone who was born after or was too young to understand 9/11 can really understand what it was like. You said, did, and thought moronic things as adolescent? Welcome to the club, but you were mercifully spared from having those things memorialized for all posterity. There was a general sense of optimism, that things were fine, and would remain so for the foreseeable future. We were at the end of history. The Soviet Union had fallen, and yeah, this George W. Bush guy seems like a doofus, but what’s the worst he could do?