Certainly, age does help one gloss over facts and forget things that now would have outraged every single cell of our beings.
I grew up during the 80s and well to be honest 90s too. I was born in 1980 and this actually allowed me to experience both decades in ways not everyone was able to back then.
I have pretty good memory, and it happens that recalling specific times in my life is no real hassle, it just involves association and suddenly images pop into my head to fill in those years gone by as weird tv-town flashback sequences.
Today I was trying to recall how my life changed during this time for, better or worse in areas that to a child are alien as the landscape on Pluto (not a planet anymore :() but that for grown ups are as decisive as what careers we will pursue.
Back then, I came to life halfway through a president's tenure, and by the time my memory started kicking in, he was still there; things changed.
I remember when the TV had a dial, and on that DIAL there were all sorts of funny numbers. Each number pointed to a frequency but really meant that those frequencies could be populated by channels, not all of them were transmitting of course.
If I am not mistaken, we had Channel 2, 4, Six and Seven. One was (according to my memory) dedicated to soccer and sports and boring things like early morning Aerobics classes, One had Music at times in the afternoon and Kung-Fu movies on the weekends, the next one had silly shows and Little House on the Prairie (and news, lots of news as told by moustachioed men that could've impersonated our favourite Italian Plumber now a days) and Channel Seven had a little bit of everything back then.
So you see I am not really making stuff up:
We had these for less than half a day, some started earlier (like the Aerobics) but others had static all the way through lunch time (at first).
Politics, were also different back then, as TVs were not at all a household appliance back then (people HAD them, but they were in reduced scope for some reason) we had more live presentations with politicians and their own gangs.
You could tell it was voting season because (where I lived) houses were painted, either green and white or red and blue, not joking here, people actually repainted houses on Elections year.
You could see flags pile up on roofs and walls, posters inundate any vertical space they could and officially people fighting each other (and sometimes maiming them) over the political preference of their families.
Back then, it was just a silly place, like Monty Python sketches gone seriously awry. We, as kids were asked to stay indoors during some of the Sunday Matinees due to the fact that people would start fighting with whatever they had at hand, and back then, our roads home were unpaved so having an idiot start a stone fight was common as well.
Over politics.
Today things are quite different, for one, TVs are not really that hard to come by, most houses definitely have ONE, but quite a few may even have one per room of the house (enough to cope with every inhabitant and then some!) and yet political coverage has been toned down on some of the more traditional media.
Last time I saw a public demonstration of political support, the way of the "Plazas Publicas" of long ago it felt like a shout out to a relic of times gone by.
My Step-Dad used to say that when he came here and lived through the 80s he was always reminded of Spain in the 60s, and mostly about how Spain had been after Franco's not so timely demise.
Economy was harsh, if you needed travel money (as in NOT colones) your best bet was to go to the black market exchange, banks here wouldn't really treat you right, that is also if you found a bank that didn't have a queue of about 3 hours to just get to a teller.
Fun times for sure.
I am sure people older than me will remember different things, while those younger than me will probably recall completely different stories.
Regardless of it it would do us well to document the past properly and apply hindsight to what we've seen rather than ask the magic 8 ball of destiny for hope on things.
Just a bit of a soundtrack of one of the songs I most enjoyed with my mum's favourite band:
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