Nostalgia For-What?

This often comes up: “Life today is so complicated, there’s too much negativity. I wish we can go back to an earlier, simpler time.” They talk about the “Good Ol’ Days,” when “there was no turmoil, people dressed decently, children respected their elders, and there was no crime.”

I had that growing up as a kid; my parents and I watched these TV shows about music and events of somewhere in the 1930s-the era of the Great Depression, workers fighting to organize (literally, like the auto workers at the River Rouge), and the rise of fascism. it wasn’t such a happy time.

When WAS that Golden Age, and what made to wonderful? How far back do you go to find this? Growing up in the ‘70s, these “Happy Days” were the ‘50s, the era of post-war prosperity (for some, not for all), a grandfatherly figure was in the White House; the time when Rock n’ Roll developed, kids hung out is soda shops, cars were works of art, women wore dresses while doing housework, girls wore poodle skirts and boys lubricated their hair.

For the older folks I was around, these halcyon years were the 1920’s, the era of Prohibition, when alcohol was banned, underground bars where in every neighborhood, and organized crime families took up the business, and economic prosperity (again, for some, not for all) flourished-before the Crash of 1929, unemployment by the millions, and people begging in the streets.

Ronald Reagan played the nostalgia card when he ran for President in 1980, when (allegedly) men and boys cut their hair short, they WORKED for a living (if they could find it), and certain demographic groups stayed “in their place,” and we actually WON wars (a reference to the Viet Nam tragedy).

This is all an effort to evade the reality of today, NOW; the problems of THIS era-drug addiction, war, poverty, racism, homophobia, workers fighting for their rights-have gone on since the dawn of time, particularly in those wonderful days of yore we keep idealizing. If we read our history thoroughly, we’ll see that those days were horrible for workers, minorities, and women, and the fights they had then we have to continue-now.