The 80s' Fads Were Really Creepy
(PD) Planets Aligned (NASA)
Copyright ©2023 — June 18, 2023
If you weren't alive in the 80s, you didn't miss much. In the 80s, if you weren't born in the 40s, then you were too young to have ever been a cool cat beatnik. In the 60s, the hippie era had been a weird mixture of different ages, but for many of us, we were finally getting close to being old enough to be a groovy hippie when the fad had already faded and died in the 70s alongside of Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.'s new song Rocky Mountain High. Henry was awesome, changing his name to John Denver, which caused a fad in Colorado, of citizens having bumper stickers that stated "Native", which meant that the individuals were native to Colorado, and were not one of the huge numbers of unwanted people invading Colorado from other states while wanting to get high in the Rocky Mountains.
When normal people see a Hollywood movie, or hear a song, or read a story, the normal people then tend to begin behaving as what they saw, heard, and read (sort of a reverse of the three monkeys). Squaresville Hollywood sloppily created the beatnik fad, tripping Hollywood created the hippie fad, and John Denver's music created the brief 'back to nature' fad. Normal human nature never changes.
The fads came and went so fast that most of us never had the opportunity to do as many dumb teenage things as our elders had done, but when the 80s rolled around, many of us were old enough to know to not get involved with any social trend that was popularized by Hollywood and song (especially the clothing, hair styles, and the oh-how-so-intensely-repulsive noise that Hollywood and the ultra-conformists called 'music'). We also ignored the short fads of 'futuristic' electrical devices, and about the only people who talked about the brief fad of electric cars were the news sensationalists who kept claiming that the 1980s electric cars were the cars of the future. (How many of the electric cars from the 70s and 80s have you seen on the roads? How many of the electric cars from the 2020s do you expect to see on the roads 40 years from now? Do you know why competent electronic techs will never ever under any circumstances whatsoever ever buy an electric car?)
For many of us, the 80s was a bland, bizarre, and really creepy decade that we would prefer to have never endured (a strong inner cringe in the chest flashes every time we so much as think of the 80s).
In 1980, the politically-confused Joan Baez was still singing the song Kumbaya which had for a long time been the politically correct song sang by several 'too young to be hippies' people as they held hands in various demonstrations, seemingly most often for the purposes of 'saving the environment' and 'human rights', while simultaneously denying everyone else their own human rights by the singers demanding that other people 'go against their human right of choice' to do what the singers themselves would not do for themselves. Confused? It's okay, because being dazed and confused was what the 80s was all about. And too, don't forget that the 80s was populated by a new generation that had spawned from parents who had climbed too high in the Rocky Mountains.
As always, the fads were short-lived, and nothing was accomplished beyond creating more social discord, and, of course, creeping us out.
Quantum Link (Q-Link, later to become America Online) became a popular online chat room for Commodore® 64 users in 1985. Q-Link had hourly charges, which could quickly get expensive, but forum moderators got to use Q-Link for free. Cheapy me, I was a moderator. One advantage of being a moderator was that I got to see a lot of people's opinions on various topics. Some chats on Q-Link I still remember, especially that of a lady demanding that everyone in America change their lifestyles to meet her own personal preferences (ala Joan Baez's demands that everyone obey her, and today's Gretas demanding that everyone obey them also). I suggested to the lady that she and her friends could start their own secluded community where they could live-out their ideals, but the lady was adamant, her continuing to demand that everyone else do it for her. And there, it was a good lesson for me to learn, that normal people will not do anything for themselves, all while they insist that someone else does all the work. The same general behavior is seen today within March For Science, Global Warming, and other social protests that demand that someone else do all the work while the protestors themselves continue being the cause of pollution, global warming, and social discord.
Another brief discussion included my commenting on how I had been researching ancient Greek, but two fellows insisted that the ancient Greek language was identical to modern conversational Greek. Today, when I see people like James Legge translating ancient Chinese texts by use of modern Chinese languages, I am reminded of the boys on Q-Link.
Normal human nature has not changed.
In 1986 there was the 'Hands Across America' social activity where lots of people (apparently with nothing better to do) held hands in long lines, while the people's wished-for goal was to have a continuous string all the way across the USA. Well, some of the lines were reportedly miles long, but the goal (of course) was not achieved, nor was the goal accomplished of funding the homeless and hungry. Instead of the alleged millions of participants investing their time into earning a few extra dollars to give to the homeless and hungry, the participants did what required the least effort. 'Hands Across America' gave the people something to do socially, which was the participants' only true personal goal: if the participants actually cared about the homeless and hungry, then why are the same participants not doing anything today to help the homeless and hungry?
Within Q-Link's spiritual forum, talk increased of the upcoming planetary Harmonic Convergence. According to the then-current gossip, the Mayan Great Cycle of 5,125 years was allegedly coming to a close, and during the following 25-26 years there would be a new heaven and earth, along with mankind being harmonically changed for the better (without any human effort of course). According to the then-current gossip, the planets were aligning, but, in reality, the 'alignment' was merely of various planets being positioned in various formations as viewed from earth (::yawn::). Nevertheless, the public had heard the words 'Harmonic Convergence', which was enough for the public to invent their own beliefs that the whole universe was magically falling into alignment 'because the Mayan calendar predicted it to be true truth'.
A lady on Q-Link, who was deep into new age stuff, she would ask people what they thought of the Harmonic Convergence, and many of the responses were as expected: the users who believed in their version of new age spirituality, claimed that they themselves were feeling the change, and that a worldwide harmony would occur when the planets aligned. In 1987, after the Harmonic Convergence occurred, the lady asked again what the people felt, and again the answers were of several people saying that they felt a new inner harmony, and that within years there would be a worldwide harmony. 36 years later, we're still waiting for that mystical magical worldwide harmony to occur.
The Harmonic Convergence event of the 80s might could be compared to 2003's and today's momentary hype of the Flynn Effect: a lot of hype for a few days or months, and then almost complete silence. The public never had a sincere interest in the Flynn Effect, nor in global warming, nor in pollution, nor in being green, nor in reforestation, nor in homelessness, nor in the Harmonic Convergence. But that has always been normal for normal people, a lot of yadda-yadda, but never do the yadda-yaddaers ever lift a finger to do anything themselves, nor are the yadda-yaddaers able to mentally control their bodies to agree with their own beliefs.
Henry David Thoreau preached 'back to Nature' in the mid-1800s, but in the ~170 years since then, still the normal general public has not yet gotten 'back to Nature', nor so much as lifted a finger to cleanse the earth under their own feet. Never, not so much as once in known history has the normal man ever 'walked his own talk'. People still cry about the burning Ford® Pintos of the 1970s, but almost no one says anything about the countless burning electric cars, burning electric scooters, burning cargo ship(s) carrying electric cars, and burning laptop batteries of today. Lines of protestors, holding hands, singing Kumbaya, crying about pollution, demanding that everyone else fix the pollution problems while the protestors themselves continue to pollute the earth beyond inhabitable limits. As always, protests are meaningless social events for normal people to herd together, have a momentary swing, scream stupid things, and then walk away. The Harmonic Convergence was no different. Next year's fad, it too will be no different.
Epilogue
A curious comparison: during the 80s when the general public was following one goofy fad to the next, I had invested much of my time attempting to solve a single question: what is the ultimate value? When I finally did discover the answer, within days I found that Edgar Cayce had a similar answer: creativity. I appreciated that I did not see the answer previously, because the search for answers enabled me to discover numerous related topics that I would not have known if all I had done was to memorize Cayce's answer.
About 36 years later, the general public — still running from one fad to the next — still does not know what the ultimate value is, nor why creativity is the ultimate value. Look at what normal people do with their lives, as compared to what a person is able to learn through self-effort. There is no value nor self-effort in following fads, which means that following fads is not creative, which means that common behavior has no value, and if a thing is not creative, then is it not destructive?
Hollywood, the song writers, the Gretas, the fads, the marches, the protests, all made loud claims of being the 'right' way, but still none bettered mankind nor Nature. None were harmonious, none converged, and none were creative.
And, if you want to get an idea of what many of us really think of the creepy 80s era of fake clothing, fake hair styles, fake facial expressions, fake voices, and all of the other extraordinarily eeky things that people did in the 80s, take a quick look at the Kumbaya video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhV_3kx9knA. Wednesday Addams' facial expression at second 19 mirrors my own. Yep, Kumbaya and the singers really creep me out too.