Reply #: Maybe it's perspective.

[Drunken Irishman]

I think for people who grew up in the inner-cities in the 1980s and early 90s, things might not seem nearly as bad as they were. I grew up in a lower income housing project in the 90s and I remember gang fights nightly. It wasn't a fun experience, yet gangs today in my city aren't nearly the issue they were in the 1980s.

Maybe that's where this comes from. Frankly, maybe it's our ability to connect beyond just our local community that makes things seem worse today than they were back then. If you had internet access in 1983 and the ability to read whatever was put out there about all the problems the country was facing, you might have felt lost and sick about what was going on in your country.

But since most of the people in the 80s had to rely on the news, radio and word of mouth, the information just wasn't there.