US History: the Totally Awesome 80s (Dude)

You know you're a dedicated home schooler when you use your high school yearbooks to define "big hair".

Since I have not given birth to you, I will refrain from showing you my yearbook and instead give you a picture of Morgan Fairchild because I wanted my hair to look like hers.

Do I even need to say it didn't?

Actually, my hair was very short all through the 80s, so I missed out on the big hair thing, but I could dream...

What else was there in the 80s?

Why, yes, we were still doing the Cold War!  In fact, we reached new heights of anxiety, or at least I did.  In the beginning of the decade, I  was absolutely convinced we would have a nuclear war before 1990. At least until Gorbechev came into power in the USSR. Watching The Day After in 1983 did not help.

Mt. St. Helen's erupted, covering  a great deal of my extended family with an inch or two of ash.

I remember they sent us some. Evidently everyone sent out of state relatives envelopes of ash, many of which broke open and gummed up the postal machines.
My grandma cleverly sent ours in a plastic tub in a bag in a box.

I also remember visiting the site ten years later and seeing the curved ash embedded trees jutting out of the mountain like fossilized ribs.  In between were drifts of pink wild flowers.

The 1980 election was the first one where I understood what was going on.  Our school held mock elections and Reagan won by a landslide.  This was about a week before the real election in which Reagan won by a landslide. I remember being weirded out that he had been an actor.

The Challenger exploded.  Chernobyl melted down. Reagan, Lennon, Pope John Paul II were all shot.

It was the age of "Just Say No" to drugs, red ribbons (AIDS awareness) and MADD.

It was the decade when we got a microwave, an Atari, and a Commodore 64.  This computer was so primitive that instead of a disk drive, it used cassette tapes....

This is also the decade that gave us boom boxes, cordless phones (slightly smaller than a shoe box but slightly more clunky) and VCRs. 

The 80s were a wild time: The colors were black and neon anything!  I learned to drive!  Gas was 99 cents a gallon! Rubic's cubes!  Pac-man! Members Only jackets! Sunglasses (at night!)!

I graduated High School, went to College, and, somewhere in between, met the Emperor!  He rocked my world enough that I don't remember much else after that.

But if you really want to know about American culture in the 80s, you can't go wrong with a look at Michael Jackson!