I'm a couple pages back in this fast-moving thread, but I wanted to respond to this.
I'm pretty close to you in demographics, and I was also a child who echoed his parents' pro-Reagan stance, and who witnessed the release of the hostages on the day of Reagan's inauguration. It really did feel like America suddenly was great again - no longer a literal hostage to a small Middle East theocracy.
The older I get, though, the more I see Reagan's poisonous influence on American thinking. Specifically, his repeated refrains of "Government IS the problem!"
That belief promotes cynicism toward our government and encourages voter apathy. And voter apathy allows interested parties (i.e. big Pharma, the banks, insurance companies, energy companies) to have completely bought and paid for the legislative branch of government. And that corporate takeover of Congress has promoted the astounding success of the richest 1% while the middle class withers away. Such inequality is unsustainable.
"Government IS the problem" leads people to generally support the idea that ALL regulation is bad. It ignores the fundamental fact that government regulation is what prevents wholesale financial fraud with companies like Enron and WorldCom. Government regulation is what keeps companies from dumping mercury into the rivers and spewing poisons into the air. Government regulation is the only thing that keeps insurance companies from denying your cancer treatment.
And now, under Trump, we see "Government IS the problem" taken to its most extreme. We have an executive branch who has appointed leadership that is hostile to the very mission of each department. We have the utterly unqualified child of a pyramid-scheme billionaire who is hostile to the idea of public education -- now SHE is who's in charge of education. We have a similarly unqualified HUD secretary hostile to the idea of helping low-income families get housing. We have a buffoon as energy secretary - someone who was too fucking stupid to remember the name of the department that he recently thought a good idea to eliminate. I could go on.
Finally, this government-hostile executive branch is appointing judges who are friendly to the ideas and beliefs of a hyper-religious minority, and friendly to the ideas of the same big corporations that have taken over the legislative branch.
And I know this sounds really crazy -- but I want safe transportation, I want public schools that educate children, I want low- and middle-income families to work with dignity and afford housing, I want a stock market that isn't completely rigged, I want the Department of Energy to safeguard nuclear weapons and nuclear waste, I want rivers that aren't filled with carcinogens, I want healthcare that isn't impossibly expensive.
If you really, actually want America to be great, then you ought to be taking actions that promote effective and efficient government.
If Reagan thought government was the problem, I wonder what he'd think now about the thoroughly incompetent and profoundly corrupt millionaires and billionaires who are systematically dismantling it, all with the GOP's enthusiastic blessing.