Well, this is conflating the early and late 1990s. The early 1990s was not great economically in the US at least. That’s how Bill Clinton, an obscure politician from an obscure state, won the Presidency – “It’s the economy, stupid!” as his slogan went because Bush Sr. was far more interested in foreign policy than actually doing anything locally. The late 1990s were prosperous, at least in Wall Street terms, but this was quite a bit from the dot-com bubble.
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The late 1990s were prosperous, at least in Wall Street terms, but this was quite a bit from the dot-com bubble.
No they were prosperous across the board, not just in Wall Street terms, and not just in the US.
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So protests that don’t fit your definition, don’t count? 
And only single, large protest marches count?
And you’re prepared to ignore the large protests and highlight small ones?
Ok.
From the Poll Tax Wikipedia article:
On 31 March 1990, people began gathering in Kennington Park from noon. Turnout was encouraged by fine weather, and between 180,000 and 250,000 arrived. The police report, a year after the riot, estimated the crowd at 200,000.
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I’d say there was probably too much. I remember the period as being one were there was always somebody wanting you to protest something or boycott something: oil companies, McDonalds, the US, globalism, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, GM crops, animal welfare, the environment generally, fox-hunting, gay rights, anti-fa, pro-union, anti-union.
I’d say oil, McDonalds, globalism in general were the most prevalent, animal welfare probably the most vociferous.
Oh and Palestine. Can’t forget Palestine. Always someone wanting you to do something about Palestine one way or the other.
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Well, they’re all things one can protest about, whether one should is an entirely different question. But you’re right, it was probably a factor that everyone would have known someone bleating on about something or other that they didn’t care about and it was probably a factor in lack of wider engagement. With a single simple issue everyone can get behind it’s easier to build support (e.g. Trump).
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AUTHOR: Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
QUOTATION: The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277 (1953).
The reason it makes no difference if the blame is justified is the impunity of the filthy scum.
Nazi punks, fuck off…
TRASH A BANK if ya got real balls
I think that’s definitely a valid point.
A lot of the protests in the 90’s didn’t get the positive press some protests now are getting.
At present there are media reporting anti-Trump or anti-fascist protests positively and some reporting them negatively.
My (admittedly probably faulty) memory from the 90’s is that pretty much all protests just got the “Protesters riot and cause $$$$s in property damage” angle as per the newspaper image you posted.
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This one was also too early for the millennials (over half of them would be too young to go to a protest by themselves) and way too late for it to be the boomers.
The British Stop the War Coalition (StWC) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city’s history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended. At the finishing rally in Hyde Park, the organisers announced 3 million attended. It remains probably the largest protest march in UK history.
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I always struggle with the generation boundaries. They keep shifting (as you’d expect from completely arbitrary marketing-derived cobblers).
I don’t remember being a Gen- X-er when I was a kid. They were all much older. Then suddenly, I’ve been a Gen-X’er all along.
Get off my lawn, young-uns!
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Lack of focus played a role within protests as well.
There were a few big protests in Australia around that time that I chose not to attend, because I couldn’t work out what they were actually protesting about apart from “everything”. And their proposed solutions were an explosion of conflicting theories from a thousand sources.
There was plenty of focused protest too, but that was generally much smaller and not directly involving the whole community. GLBT rights, forest conservation, etc.
You’re right that prosperity played a role, although that prosperity was largely built by overclocking the finance sector and setting up the GFC. The 0.0001% were still ramping up the squeeze, but it hadn’t gotten anywhere close to what it is now.
Ordinary folks mostly felt that things were gradually getting better. It was a time when it seemed like reform had a realistic chance.
I am borderline, but consider myself to be millennial because my school year were the first to not get student grants from the government.
Not that I believe in generations that much other than to annoy the people who complain about snowflakes. I have mentioned before that according to the theory, millennials should fill the same role as the greatest/GI generation. So not really snowflakes at all then.
Yeah, that’ll definitely make a nice generational dividing line.
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That theory’s looking a bit more plausible to me these days [1]. The radical kids of 2017 are astonishingly impressive in their organisation, intelligence and determination.
.
[1] Well, not really. But it’s a happy coincidence.
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I count myself as a millennial (I was born in 1980), because I always felt like Gen X was the kids who were older than me (the ones who got grants for university, rather than loans and tuition fees).
While every generation goes through the exact same cycle (damn those old people for keeping me down >> damn those kids for being on my lawn), I think there’s a big difference in attitudes for those of of us who grew up with computers, the internet, and mobile phones (none of those were ubiquitous when I was born, but they were by the time I was an adult).
Also, the article claims that there’s not much difference in housing for the current generation vs older generations, but in the UK the ratio of average annual wage, to average house price, has gone from about 2.5:1 in the 1960’s to 10:1 now. That makes a big difference.
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People felt that way because things really were getting better, and most of the gains made in that period are still here today, and in many cases have been built on, even after the financial collapse (and while we haven’t fully recovered from that, we have in many ways, unemployment is way down again, wages still need to recover relative to where they reached, but still are higher than they were before the growth started in the first place, relative inequality has increased, but objective levels of poverty have not, in fact they’ve continued to decrease world wide).
The prosperity wasn’t largely built up by overcooking the finance sector either, that was something that ballooned out of control relatively quickly towards the end. A lot of it started in the 80s and continued on throughout the 90s and early 2000s, in all sectors, not just real estate, technology most obviously, all kinds of service sectors, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, education, all areas saw big growth, and big efficiency increases, very low unemployment across the board and rising wages, public sector pay saw massive increases as well, and while amongst all of that there was much irresponsible speculation, it was largely based on solid foundations.
Yup. Things are actually getting better in lots of ways.
Lots more on that site.
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Okay, I’m talking about protests in the US during the classical GenX “slacker” period in the early 1990s. Because the way generations work (to the level they do at all), yes, even somebody born in 1979 is GenX, and so you can technically claim that things like the 1999 WTO protest or the 2003 Iraq invasion protest were GenX things, but this wasn’t at all the people that Linkletter was talking about in his movie Slacker (1990) or Douglas Coupland’s novel “Generation X” (1991), which dealt with people in university or just after at this time.
I refer the Hon. gentleman to the answer I gave a few moments ago.
But ok, even with that redefinition - nice going on ignoring the majority of the world’s population in the relevant demographic by the way, very splendid isolationist - I’ll bite:
http://www.forerunner.com/fyi/social-protests-in-the-1990s-planning-a-response
http://now.org/about/history/history-of-marches-and-mass-actions/
http://www.lib.niu.edu/1990/ii900413.html
http://americanarchive.org/exhibits/first-amendment/protests-80s-andbeyond
Plenty of examples in the late 80’s to early 90s to be found.
