I wasn’t born in Texas, I was born outside of San Diego, CA. But eventually my dad got a professorship at Texas Tech University and we all moved to the plains of west Texas, namely Lubbock. If you’ve never been to that section of America you really aren’t missing a whole lot. You’ve probably heard about the so-called ‘bible belt’? Well consider Lubbock the buckle of that belt. It seems like there’s a church on every corner, and a bar on every opposite corner. Oh, and it ranks 38th nationwide for STD rates per capita. That’s not a good thing.
But all of that aside, Lubbock was also extremely caught up in the 80′s ‘Satanic Panic’ that swept the country’s more fundamentalist cities. So when one of my old high school teachers posted this flier he had from 1979 I had to share it because its so sad and hilarious.
Yes, stuff like this was rampant in Lubbock throughout the 80′s AND 90′s. I remember our school banned the peace sign because they claimed it was an upside down broken cross and was therefore Satanic. The PEACE SIGN! They also forced friends of mine to change clothes when one wore a shirt that said ‘Drugs Suck’ because the word suck was offensive, and one had to change because he had an anti-Nazi symbol on his jacket. That’s right, a swastika with the red circle and line through it, like no-smoking signs, was bad?
Anyway this is what its like growing up in a real town like the one in Footloose.