OM wrote:

...It wasn't that we won the Cold War, it was the *way* it was won.
The entire Gen-X or "Depression Era Rock" generation was the result of
the youths of the late 80's - early 90's growing up expecting the US
and/or the USSR to accidentally nuke each other over a radar picking
up a dead bird on its antenna and interpreting it as a sneak attack.
But in order to survive, the paranoia resulting from such approaching
and guaranteed assured destruction had to be suppressed and/or
redirected in order to function in life.
Living with several hundred Minutemen missiles in North Dakota was
interesting; you just treated the possibility that the whole state might
vanish in around an hour someday like lightning, yeah, you might get
croaked someday, but the odds were low on any particular day.
Then, all of a sudden, we
wake up one morning and the Evil Soviet Empire has collapsed upon
itself following a failed coup and a crumbled wall in Berlin. The
Monster Under The Bed That Was Real was no more, and these kids' poor
fragile psyches just crumbled because now they didn't have that
perpetual threat to blame every screwup on.


That really did screw up a lot of psyches, but to me it seemed that our
generation handled it a lot better than our elders did.
To them it was a major change in their whole world view. It also put the
first nail in the Republican coffin, which I doubt Reagan had in mind
when he set out to bring the commies down.
After he's killed the dragon, what's the White Knight to do next?

Pat