Social, economic, health, and environmental disasters on all scales, produced by human hands. The 1980s were so crammed with ‘em that even in this double-
o 1980: U.S. boycotts Summer Olympics in Moscow
o 1981: attempted assassination of the Pope
o 1982: Tylenol product-
o 1983: Marine barracks bombing in Beirut
o 1984: Bhopal chemical disaster
o 1984: Soviets boycott Summer Olympics in Los Angeles
o 1985: Crack cocaine appears
o 1987: October stock-
o 1988: medical waste washes ashore on Long Island
o 1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska
They say that we Generation Xers have no sense of the future, that we live in the now without regard for consequences -- famously, more of us believe that UFOs are alien transportation devices than believe that Social Security will be there for us when we get old. (And that was before the current administration started futzing with it... which only confirmed our fears.) But even if that UFO tidbit is not true, it rings true, which is why the meme spread so successfully.
Xers generally are not hopeful for the future, but is it any wonder, when the years of our adolescence or very young adulthood were spent watching the world seemingly fall apart through a wide variety of stupid human failures, from sheer incompetence (drunk ship captain runs oil tanker aground) to outright maliciousness (Tylenol scare)? One man with a gun or a bomb, one tiny O ring, one little plan to sell weapons to the enemy... This is why we make and consume stuff like The Matrix and Lost: Of course planes crash. Of course the machines are going to enslave us. What else should we expect from them?
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