LOL! Maybe in your humble part of the country, but in NYC, Chicago, Philly, etc. the locales were in the midst of the CRACK EPIDEMIC and the 1980s saw crime rates that were considerably HIGHER than they were in the 1990s and first half of this decade! If you look at justice department statistics violent crime PEAKED in the 1980s/early 90s in most of the country.
"High school flunkouts" making a good living you say? Back in the 1980s, the same losers were WHINING about "the loss of unskilled factory jobs" as are currently doing. The 1980s are when more women than ever joined the workforce to support the family.
I think you have the 1980s confused with the early 1960s.
Where I was at the time, hard drugs and gang warfare didn’t get noticeable untill ‘88 or ‘89. Maybe 87 at the earliest. And didn’t get bad until early 90s. There were still alot of highpaying unskilled jobs available to anyone that wanted them until probably the early eighties and didn’t dry up until I’d say the early nineties.
Also traffic didnt’ get bad until mid nineties. Illegal mexicans didn’t show up until nineties. Cops didn’t get bad attitudes until late eighties/early nineties...about the same time as the crime started to rise. Prostitution was rampant though, until maybe 15 years ago. Pot was rampant too and I assume it still is.
The only serious things I remember happening in the 80s was reagan pulling out of lebanon, the tylenol poisoning scare, paper boys were being abducted and molested and killed, Princess dianna having a baby, and the return of the american made convertible. Some people were having money problems as I remember. But it didn’t affect me or my relatives.
This was in Omaha. I don’t live there anymore.