The battle with nostalgia must be constant. I don’t mean that we should abandon history but we should view even history with a critical eye. Nobody says that historians can’t be political or nationalistic, irrational, or crazy or just plain liars.
Romanticizing the past is a tempting affliction for us older people…Who wouldn’t rather remember when we could run for miles or make love all night or look in the mirror without sighing…instead of thinking twice about being able to jog across the street or waking up to the singing alarm of arthritis? Never mind that we rarely ever ran for miles or made love ALL night…(Please!) .And if the mirror scares us…we don’t have to look.
I catch myself all the time saying “when I was young…blah blah blah” . It bores the crap out of younger people and it bores the crap out of me. Bread didn’t taste better back in the day…I might have been more able to taste it then, before my taste buds got old along with the rest of me. Cars weren’t better, The T.V. shows weren’t better…(well there are more now and some of them are pretty lousy…and would have been thirty years ago.) Movies weren’t better although some of the classics are still worth watching. People, morals, politics, weren’t always better either.
And for those who say that young people were better behaved back in the day…go back and read a few newspapers from the summers of 1956,57, 58. Some people think that gangs were invented in the nineties…nope…there have always been gangs.
Young people can’t live in the fantasy past of our nostalgia. It’s like an indulgence old folks have…we can go either way…We can say “Awww! you think you’ve got it bad…things were much worse in my day…” Well maybe. Or we can say ” Ohh there’s so much violence. Things were so much better in my day…” Sorry…bullshit! Younger people live in a world completely different than the one I lived in…they have to find solutions to problems I never confronted. But they also have to live with problems that are pretty damn similar to some of the ones I confronted along with my peers. And we did learn some tricks that could be useful today. We could be a valuable resource…but to do it we need to cut the crap, lose the nostalgia and be honest about history.
Yes, these days there are more guns and drugs and knives on the street, in the schools…but that doesn’t mean there were none of those back in the day. We found ways to get hurt, get killed, in cars, drunk, in fights, with drugs, and just plain stupidity.
I think we need to stop “reaching out” to young people with our lectures and lessons and the stories true or false, about our younger, braver, stronger, wiser, better dressed, better behaved, selves. And maybe if we do that for a while…we’ll stop being boring old farts…and become more trustworthy…and they’ll reach out to us.
Of course we can still tell our bullshit stories to each other…makes us all feel young again.
Chagal4's Blog 
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