When people talk about the 90s being good and better than today, they aren’t just remembering being a child or waxing poetic like boomers do about the 50s. What they are actually talking about is the hope and inspiration that came with the New World Order and everything else that was going on in the 90s.

People don’t remember it but first world country doesn’t mean better country it means NATO country. Second world was referring to countries aligned with the Warsaw Pact, and third world were countries not aligned with either. When the second world fell at the end of the Soviet Union the expectation was that the second world would become part of the first world and the third world would begin it moves towards being a benevolent second world and eventually become part of the first world too.

In addition to a political upheaval that was representative of the relief of decades of Cold War, there were also huge scientific advances being made. Things like the International Space Station, Hubble, and the Voyager program were all returning science and becoming realities. We had just discovered for instance that Jupiter had rings. Not to mention things like the Montreal Accords.

It was also a time of a second coming of the civil rights movement, the 90s are when it became OK to be gay for the most part. 1992 was The Year of the Woman, largely in response to and in spite of the Anita Hill debacle. There was an open-mindedness and a willingness to accept progress that just disappeared a few years later.

It’s that, that hope and willingness to accept science, that’s what people miss about the 90s, and it’s what people were really hoping Obama would bring back.

And I fully recognize that the Rush Limbaughs and Fox Newses of the world where already well passed the point of no return for killing off this feeling well before the 90s came around. I’m just talking about why people wax poetic about the 90s and it’s not just people who were kids, even my parents talk about what it was like to be gay and out in the 90s and the hope and inspiration that came with that.