We all miss the Cold War, don’t we?

Look, kid, I know life is hard. Times aren’t as great as they were when I was your age. Back then, we knew where the punches were coming from. There was just one enemy: the commies. And we knew exactly where they were — somewhere in the East. Our only fear was a third world war, but even if it happened, we were sure we wouldn’t have much time to be scared because a nuclear war would’ve ended everything in a minute or two. So, really, there wasn’t much to worry about.

In almost every neighborhood of the city I grew up in, there were these iron boxing rings — some big, some small. We loved jumping in them and playing Rocky. One time, my cousin jokingly punched me and gave me a nosebleed. He spent the rest of our childhood bragging about it — idiot. After Rocky beat Ivan Drago and ended the Cold War, probably in the summer of ’86, the city decided to remove those iron rings. That’s when we discovered they had stairways underneath them. Turns out those rings were actually the entrances to an underground shelter spanning the whole city. The municipality didn’t feel the need to wait for the wall to come down like the rest of the world. I mean, even the entire Politburo, including Gorbachev, gave Rocky a standing ovation — what better ending could you ask for?

We didn’t have to prepare for any natural disasters either. Our houses were sturdy — what kind of earthquake could bring them down, right? And everyone knew to hide under a table during an earthquake, because tables back then weren’t made of cheap chipboard like today; they were solid wood. Then came the Mexico earthquake. In one collapsed school, the only kids who survived were the ones who couldn’t find space under a table and hid between them instead. That’s how the whole world mistakenly learned the “right” way.

During the Cold War, for those who were confused and couldn’t decide which side to pick, there was a third option too. It was nice having multiple choices. We applied that in the schoolyard as well — you didn’t have to side with Dirk or Enver; you could just hang out with Olaf. Nowadays, you’re either on one side, or you’re just plain bad.

The concept of “bad” was also much clearer back then. Darth Vader was bad. Joker was bad. They weren’t portrayed as products of troubled childhoods like today. If you hit a friend, you got punished. If you stole a chocolate bar, the police came. If you spat on the ground, some old lady would scold you — and no one called her a “Karen.” Showing respect to elders was still an honorable thing, and cheating on an exam could get you expelled from school.

Yes, kid, my childhood was much better than yours. Our moms would send us out on our bikes after work just to have some peace of mind, and they weren’t worried about where we were all day. And we would do all sorts of dumb stuff without fear of being punished. In my childhood, a mistake could be resolved with either an apology or a slap. Sometimes we were given chores as punishment, but even that wasn’t too bad compared to the trouble we caused.

I wish the end of the Cold War had brought the peace everyone hoped for. Maybe then you would’ve had a better childhood than mine. But after it ended, we — the “good guys” — realized that without a bad guy in front of us, we weren’t actually that good. We wanted to be good, but we just couldn’t manage it. So we invented new villains. But the ones we made up couldn’t fill the gap left by the ones we used to hate, and in the end, we couldn’t be as good as we once were. All those famous villains we feared as kids — especially Darth Vader — started to seem like innocent anti-heroes compared to the real-life evils we see today, as you can very clearly see for yourself.