Ryan Reynolds Said What?

Upon hearing Ryan Reynolds flapping his lips about how terrible the '80s were, my first response was, “Who?” After being told that he played Deadpool, my response didn’t really change that much. I know who Deadpool is, but I’ve never seen the movie, not even the one with Wolverine in it, and I love Hugh Jackman. I don’t go to see many movies. They’re expensive, and most of the time, there aren’t many that seem enjoyable. In fact, the last movie I saw was Minions & Monsters, which was awesome.

Then I learned that he is five years younger than me and is from Canada. He was four when the '80s started and lived in a completely different country. Why did he feel the need to comment on something he knew nothing about? It’s not just him. All over X, Canadians are weighing in on how terrible the U.S. is and how the country could be run better. Funny, those same Canadians don’t have a single problem coming to the U.S. for healthcare, eh?

I was eight when the '80s started. I am firmly in Gen X. My sibling is at the tag end of the Baby Boom, sometimes called Generation Jones (1954-1965). My dad worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C., before you could make money at it. My mom also worked for the federal government, back in the day, but she left to have my sibling. During the '80s, my family moved around, and I, personally, went to five schools in three states, and yes, my mom kept up with all of the shot records for me.

I remember going on lots of field trips as a kid in Washington, D.C.; some of them were better than others. Riding a train was cool; visiting the FBI building and museum was very cool. Being taken through more than one fine arts museum was not cool. It’s really hard to get six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds interested in fine art. My elementary school was a big brick building that was so old, it didn’t have a cafeteria. By the time I came along, the cafeteria had been wedged into part of the auditorium. It’s still there. The building must be over 100 years old by now.

There were birthday parties, Halloweens, and Thanksgiving dinners, including the year the cat tried to take the turkey off my mom’s plate when she went into the kitchen for something. Christmas was always a celebration, and so was New Year's. I didn’t want for anything.

While I didn’t have a bad childhood, it could have been better. My father passed away in 1978 from lung cancer when I was six. He smoked cigarettes before filters existed. My mother, who hadn’t been in the workforce since the early '60s, suddenly had to find a job at a time when women were still, by and large, expected to stay at home.

She made the momentous decision to leave Washington, D.C., because it wasn’t a place she wanted to raise children by herself, and we lived in the “nice” section of D.C. She also did not have the money to send either of us to a pricey private school. If you ever want to see someone deal with adversity and finish in style, you should have met my mother.

We moved to upstate New York to a town called Poughkeepsie while my sibling finished high school in Troy, New York. (Yes, the D.C. public schools were so wonderful that my sibling attended high school in a completely different state.) My mom had gone to college in Poughkeepsie, on a scholarship, in the '40s. She rented a house from a professor who was on sabbatical, and I went to an elementary school that was two miles from our house. I remember it as a nice house, very big. There was a huge backyard stretching down the hill the house was on, and at the bottom there was a lake that froze over in the winter. The college was fairly small, and I was allowed to sell Girl Scout cookies by myself. I was eight.

Upstate New York in the winter is not at all pleasant. One day, it was so cold, my mom had us come inside and wait for the bus because my friend had forgotten her gloves and her fingers were turning blue. The 1980 Winter Olympics took place three hours to the north of us, in Lake Placid. We watched everything as long as the antenna kept working. When the Miracle on Ice happened, we were all watching it with my mom, who had the flu. I can honestly say that I had never seen people dance in the streets before, and I’ve only seen it once since, in 2017, when the Houston Astros won the World Series. Our house was on the main thoroughfare, and the honking of the horns was deafening.

How did Canada do? They came in sixth place, and it was the first time Canada had a hockey team at the Winter Olympics since 1968. I don’t know why. I couldn’t find a reason quickly. So, no wonder the Canadians, including Reynolds, are a bit spicy about losing in their national sport.

My elementary school was a big brick building that had been built in the early 1900s. It was so old that it was built with a boy’s entrance on one end and a girl’s entrance on the other. “Boys” and “Girls” were carved into the lintels above the entrance doors. There were huge rooms with coat closets, and the library and cafeteria were in the basement. Since then, the building has been turned into apartments, which really amazed me.

I remember going with my mom when she voted in the 1980 presidential election. I was a short kid, and the Carter signs were bright green and right at my eye level. My grandmother was 25 before she was allowed to vote because of the 19th Amendment. My mom made sure she voted every single time she could. Those machines were fascinating to a small child. When you finished, you pulled one lever and everything reset. It was quite a letdown when I voted for the first time ten years later and I was handed a ballot and a pencil.

Something to keep in mind is that the internet did not exist at this point in time. There were no 24-hour news stations until CNN started on June 1, 1980, and you needed cable for that. There were three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and usually PBS. Sometimes, there were UHF stations. Your family watched the evening news and the national news, and that was it. There was also the newspaper to read.

There wasn’t a constant drumbeat of, “Everything is terrible and we’re all going to die,” and this was during the Cold War. I walked past the Fallout Shelter sign with the blue nuclear symbol on the wall a thousand times at my elementary school. No big deal. It was better then; people weren’t constantly on edge. The newscasters, in my memory and opinion, kept their opinions off the air. My parents watched Walter Cronkite until he retired and believed most of what he reported. There was plenty of skepticism from both of them. After Walter Cronkite retired, Dan Rather took over for the next 24 years. I remember watching both men. I was shocked to discover, as an adult, that Walter Cronkite was a huge liberal. I had never seen that when he was reporting, but I was also nine.

We were in Poughkeepsie when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, John Lennon was killed, the hostages came home, and President Reagan was shot. My mom took me to Stewart Airport, an hour north of us, to see the hostages land. That must have been quite a shift for them — to go from the warm Middle East to frigid New England. The main thing I remember was that it was blanking cold. It was so cold that the ambulances that were posted there opened their treatment bays so people could sit in them and not get frostbite. The buses holding the former hostages drove past, and we all waved and waved American flags. It was very exciting.

I was taking swim lessons in March 1981. One day, I couldn’t get my mom to budge from the television, and all I could think was that I was going to miss my swim lesson. I was nine, and President Reagan had just been shot. As an adult, I look back now and think: “Of course she wasn’t going to move. Duh.” At the time, I was not happy. My mom was still working for the federal government when President John F. Kennedy was killed. She was heading home to start maternity leave when someone came down the hall and told her. My sibling was born eight days later. My mom had a very good reason for standing unmoving before the television. My fourth grade class made get-well cards for the president. Because there was no social media, no one was instantly broadcasting their opinions. In those days, if you said something truly stupid, you were made to regret it by anyone listening.

Who was the prime minister of Canada in 1980? Pierre Trudeau, the father of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister who stepped down last year. I have never heard anything good about Pierre Trudeau from either my U.S. friends and family or my Canadian friends. Apparently, 1980 was the start of Pierre Trudeau’s second term! Maybe if Canadians focused on voting in people who actually think, their lives would be better. The U.S. blows hot and cold. We elect someone good, and then we elect an idiot.

My family moved to Houston, Texas, in the fall of 1981 because my sibling got a scholarship to a prestigious university located there. We moved to Houston and not Dallas because my mom discovered it snowed in Dallas, and she was done with the snow. She also decided to go to law school and help women who had been victimized after their husbands had died, like people tried to do to her. At the age of 52, she went to law school in Houston. So, my mom is in law school, my sibling is in college, and I’m in a church school for fifth grade.

When sixth grade came and I went to a public junior high, I did so well, I flunked sixth grade. So my mom found a tiny private school that didn’t cost a fortune. It was a great school. I went to sixth and seventh grade there. My mom graduated from law school in 1984 and started to study for the bar exam. I probably spent more time than I should have at my sibling’s university, but it couldn’t be helped. My mom passed the bar and was hired by the county we lived in. She worked there until I graduated from college. When she was hired, she told me her job was to say "No." I was 12, and I remember thinking, that should be easy; she has no problem saying "No" to me.

My sibling graduated in 1985 with a degree in computer engineering. Computer science wasn’t a full-fledged major yet. We went to the mainframe computer once so my sibling could finish an assignment. It was very loud, very big, and very cold. Compare that to today’s computers.

I started eighth grade at another public junior high school in a town southwest of Houston. My mom was done with Houston Independent School District. That’s where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. Texas History was the class I was in when, at the end of class, the principal came on the P.A. system and told us what had happened. I can still see my Texas History teacher sitting behind me, running the projector for a slide show on Texas Native Americans. Science happened to be my next class.

What has stuck with me to this day is the absolute, utter silence in the hallways during the passing period. Not a sound was made. Nothing. My science teacher certainly had her hands full that day. I thought about her when I was teaching during 9/11.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. I was 18 and a senior in high school. My mom said she never thought she would see the wall come down in her lifetime. Mine, probably, but not hers. I graduated in 1990 right in the middle of my class of 550 students. I went off to college to be a teacher.

When I look back at the '80s, I don’t see a terrible time full of worry and fear. I see a time of opportunity and optimism. Things were moving in the right direction. The Statue of Liberty was refurbished. It was an awesome time to be a kid. Perhaps Reynolds should stick to reading what’s put in front of him. He doesn’t do so well when speaking off the cuff.

Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.

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