Back to the future - a common past

By Karen Abravanel

Last Friday, as I combed through gobs of hairspray and slipped off my improvised leg-warmers, I pondered the future of the 1990s. I had just returned from the Safety Dance, Yale's annual tribute to the music and culture of the '80s. I continued, however, to revisit the enduring objects of nostalgia after I left.

My ears rang for hours with synthesized beats. I joked about Reaganomics, bragged about my top scores in Atari Pole Position, and recalled my letter to the students whose teacher died in the Challenger explosion. Remembering the time when my cousins taped a music video of "We are the World" using their collection of 29 Cabbage Patch Kids, I listened to a friend praise the song as "such a generational thing."

These "generational things" abound in our memories. Despite Yale's diversity, thousands of students with many backgrounds share a common '80s heritage. Who doesn't remember "We are the World?" Or the Challenger explosion? Who hasn't tried the Moonwalk? Maybe we aren't so different after all.

Nostalgia is a funny thing, built on a combination of personal memories and cultural images. Most of us are too young to remember much about the '80s, so we rely on the decade's television shows, movies, and music to recreate our memories.

Thus, we look back to the trials of Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, and the encounters between Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, and the rest of the bratpack in The Breakfast Club. Forgetting that we could barely talk when Family Ties began its television run, or that we were never old enough to see The Breakfast Club in theaters, we adopt these characters' experiences as our own. We build these experiences into our lives, growing nostalgic for a constructed past.

We have imposed a single, cultural identity onto our recollections of the '80s. Ignoring our individual differences, and disregarding the fact that then, as now, people had unique ideas and tastes, we celebrate the monolith of "'80s culture." From CD compilations of "'80s music" to "video specials," from the "'80s Web Server" to last weekend's Safety Dance, the products of our selective nostalgia are omnipresent. "Call me a child of the eighties," demands the author of a widely forwarded email.

Yet as we emphasize our homogeneity in the last decade, we acclaim our diversity in this one. The '90s are the era of the individual--we work hard to stand out among our peers, searching for that which makes us unique and special. This quest for individuality often takes us to past decades. Just as our society blends thousands of backgrounds, our present combines several pasts: we listen to '80s music, wear retro '70s clothing, debate '60s ideas, and aspire to '50s ideals.

Because the '90s are such an aggregation, the decade might seem impossible to define. But 10 years from now, the "children of the '90s" will construct their own generational nostalgia. Combining their faint memories of the Gulf War with the surviving plot lines of Beverly Hills, 90210 they will create a single collective picture of the '90s.

Born in 1986, my younger brother will be just as much a child of the '90s as I am a child of the '80s. On the eve of the "Party like it's 1999" dance, David will laugh about his '90s childhood. That evening, he will pull on his Bart Simpson mask, and adjust his worn plaid flannel shirt. "Nice shirt, Dave!" someone will yell over the din of No Doubt's "Spiderwebs."

"Thanks," he'll say. "I found it in the back of my sister's closet." His date, in her platform sneakers, will worry that her improvised belly button ring will fall out when she starts dancing to the beat of the Macarena.

"This is really phat," she will say. It will be a night to remember, filled with generational things.

Karen Abravanel is a junior in Davenport.

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