I may have been one of the lucky. With all it’s warts, the 80’s, for many young people, were a banger. Sort of the final bang of the 60’s and 70’s. Perfect? Nowhere near, but the music, social, artistic, and so many other aspects, were pretty damn cool, and for the young crowd it was mainly what mattered. Things like the fall of the Berlin wall, the perceived end of the end of the cold war and the nuclear Armageddon threat gave us a sense of optimism. Looking back there are things, like the Reagan/Thatcher tandem, that were setting the stage to the neo-liberal clusterfuck we live in, but our focus was elsewhere.