Does anyone remember
Spitting Image? They did a Genesis video, for the song "Land of Confusion", with their Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher puppets. Some of the lyrics:
I must've dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They're moving into the street.
Now did you read the news today
They say the danger's gone away
But I can see the fire's still alight
There burning into the night.
That album came out in 1986, when I was a junior in high school.
Call me nosy, but I'm always curious about who's behind the dailyKos handle, especially what your political history is, and to what extent, if any, you were involved in politics as a teenager.
So, look below the fold for some stuff about me, and you can tell me about yourself, too.
I have to confess that I got hooked on that VH1 series
"I love the 80's", because I needed something other than bad news to watch, and I'm also an 80's kid. I graduated from high school in 1987.
So that's what started me thinking about this diary.
I graduated from high school in 1987, so I was in high school during some of the Reagan years. Since I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the whole weapons lab thing was literally just outside of town, at Sandia National Labs, and of course there was Los Alamos National Labs up north. So when people called him "Ronnie Ray-gun", it made sense. The defense industry was booming, and New Mexico did well by that.
My parents are very far left liberals, so they were not fond of Reagan (to put it nicely). So, I had a pretty dim view of Reagan as well, and being a hardcore science nerd, I probably understood the defense stuff a little better than my parents. I was one of those kids who went to the regional, state, and international science fairs and conferences; in fact, I was one of the forty Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalists in 1987, and Reagan was supposed to come talk to us, but was busy (with something - no idea what), so we met some science adviser dude instead. It was a fun week in D.C., for a bunch of nerds who had nothing but a bright future ahead of them, or so we thought.
So I guess I wasn't "political", i.e., I didn't go to protests, and wasn't involved in student government. But I was no Reagan fan, and was always thinking about the nuclear arsenal under the mountains outside Albuquerque.
Finally, I'll leave you with the ultimate 80's picture. Yeah, there's politics here: this is a picture of me when I was 17 years old, with my gay friend Tom. We were in a Catholic high school, and he didn't give a damn about what anyone thought about his sexual preferences. He was also one of my first boyfriends; I should have known something was up when he had a pretty elaborate homage to Marilyn Monroe in posters and calendars in his room.
Gotta love our hair. Scary.
Ok, now it's your turn. Tell us your story!