The ’80s were neon, noisy, and nuts — a decade of MTV, mixtapes, and mall culture. But underneath all that Aqua Net hairspray and optimism was a whole lot of chaos, tragedy, and straight-up weirdness people rarely talk about anymore. So when Reddit user u/TONTTONCLUB asked, “What are some awful things from the ’80s everyone seems to not talk about?” the answers turned into a time capsule of everything dark, absurd, and unforgettable about the decade that defined a generation:
1.
“25¢-per-minute long-distance phone calls.”
2.
“The Challenger explosion. I was in sixth grade. We were going to get to watch transmissions from a school teacher in space. Space missions had gotten to the point of seeming safe and routine. Then, in a split second, seven people died horrifically as we watched on our screens.”
3.
“The time in 1982 when some guy tampered with Tylenol capsules with cyanide, killing people. The event spawned copycats, which killed even more people.”
4.
“AIDS/HIV. Nobody knew what it was, if it would be curable, how it spread, or if it would spread to the general population. It was damn near like Ebola, but it was right here. Religious fundamentalists were claiming it was God’s wrath visited on homosexuals. Front-page pictures showed victims suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma. It was pretty terrifying — not least because it brought out the worst in so many people. I lost a couple of friends.”
5.
“The ‘Satanic Panic’ — moral outrage over supposed Satanic rituals taking place in schools and daycares, based on obviously manipulated children’s testimonies, which actually resulted in a lot of innocent people going to prison. We think of witch hunts as something that happened back in colonial America, but it happened in the modern US up into the mid-1990s. We started to see a resurgence of the ‘Satanic Panic’ with the Pizzagate conspiracy — the same sensational tales of underground dungeons and ritual Satanic sexual abuse.”
6.
“Waiting in line behind someone filling out a check at the grocery store.”
7.
“Almost all the air traffic controllers in the country got fired on the same day.”
8.
“On Sept. 26, 1983, a nuclear early-warning system in the Soviet Union detected five missiles coming from the United States. Lt. Col. Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov knew that if the US were going to launch missiles, they would use a lot more than five because they had an arsenal of more than 7,000 nukes. He told everyone it was a false alarm. Today, he’s recognized as ‘the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war.’ I never see anyone talking about his actions or the late Cold War in general.”
9.
“Tipper Gore (Al’s wife) got upset over the lyrics to ‘Darling Nikki’ by Prince, started the PMRC, tried to censor artists, slapped those dumb stickers on albums and CDs, debated singer Jello Biafra on Oprah, and ended up getting members of 2 Live Crew arrested — then lost in court.”
10.
“The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.”
11.
“The savings and loan crisis. A smaller reflection of 2008, caused by speculation, stupid government policies, and deregulation. One-third of small savings and loan banks went bankrupt in the US.”
12.
“One of my nephews ran up a $700-plus phone bill one month by calling those 976 phone-sex numbers during the 1980s. My brother refused to pay the bill. This resulted in the phone company shutting off his service, and to this day — more than 30 years later — my brother still has a huge unpaid bill with AT&T and can’t get a phone in his own name. The funniest part was when my nephew (who was 11 or 12 at the time) denied making the calls and claimed someone must have broken into the house to use the phone. He couldn’t explain how the bill showed that the calls were all made during the half-hour between the time he got home from school and his parents got home from work every day for a whole month.”
13.
“Oh God, how long do you have? I could list ‘awful things about the 1980s’ all day long, like the Iran-Contra Affair.”
14.
“Popular movies and shows sometimes referenced situations we would now call rape, and it was contextualized as no big deal. Revenge of the Nerds is one example.”
15.
“All the serial killers, especially in America. It really feels like so many came out of the 1970s and 1980s, and I still can’t fathom why.”
16.
“No one wore seat belts. It was just loose kids all over the car and in ‘the way back’ (the hatch) or truck beds. I remember traveling more than two hours for a vacation in the bed of a truck under a camper top.”
17.
“The fear brought on by the War on Drugs and ever more draconian federal punishments. Even smoking marijuana was too dangerous for people of standing. I remember going to this Berkeley grad student–lecturer–intellectual party in someone’s backyard with my then-girlfriend, a lifelong pothead and perpetual grad student who lived off her parents. She lit up a joint, and people hissed at her and shot her looks — them in their beards and neat tweeds and natural-fabric clothing. They were all afraid and didn’t even want to be in the presence of someone smoking dope because it might somehow implicate them and endanger their teaching appointment or research forever. Five years earlier, all these people would have been happily bombed along with my girlfriend. That was the Reagan years for you — fighting wars against this or that crime that were never won, but made everybody afraid. In the end, that was really the point.”
18.
“Cocaine everywhere. We were buying each other grams for birthday presents when we were 16. Also, getting into bars at 15 and 16. If you were born in 1966, it was easy to doctor your driver’s license and make the 6 a 0. We lived in a city where weed was pretty much decriminalized — anything under an ounce was a $25 fine — but for some weird reason, in my high school, only guys smoked marijuana. It was considered taboo for girls, no clue why. In my first year of high school, the seniors had their own lounge where they could smoke cigarettes, which is just wild to think about today. There was also an area behind the auto shop where we could smoke. The cop assigned to our high school would join us.”
19.
“Racism was actually much, much worse than it is today. It’s getting better every decade.”
20.
“Having to buy full-priced cassettes or CDs after you got the first six for a penny.”
22.
“Among the ones deliberately forgotten, it seems, and probably my most-hated thing about the 1980s: the Volcker ‘Put.’ Paul Volcker was made Federal Reserve chairman because he believed that unions were solely to blame for the stagflation of the 1970s. In order to generate enough scabs to break the unions once and for all, he deliberately doubled the unemployment rate. Once the job was done, he then slashed interest rates so that Reagan would get credit for ending unemployment. The sheer depths of depravity and cynicism in the Reagan administration have been enthusiastically scrubbed from history by a bipartisan consensus of politicians, think tanks, and textbook committees determined to normalize Reaganomics.”
23.
“Also…white dog shit. That was weird.”
Which of these do you actually remember living through (or hearing your parents rant about)? Drop your stories and memories in the comments or in the anonymous form below.
