The good ol’ days
Imagine yourself 30 years from now, looking back on our time now and sharing your personal reminiscences about these times to… your children, or your grandchildren, really just anyone decades younger that you.
What would you call these times?
That’s right, you’d call them “The good ol’ days.”
I know it doesn’t seem that way. Just scan social media, or the gossip among friends, or that truly horrific environmental outlook from the U.N., and on and on.
And yet, even with that, you’ll think of these days as “The good ol’ days.”
It always sounded like the good ol’ days from my parents: those times in the 1930’s and 1940’s when everything was bright and shiny and full of possibility. Everything, that is, except the Great Depression, and poliovirus, and World War II.
Family members of the 1950s have related to me how it felt to ride around in hot rods, go to the choc’late shop, wear poodle skirts, and that whole scene, and it sounds glorious indeed. Except for the Korean War, segregation, the threat of nuclear armageddon, McCarthyism, censorship, and so much more.
When you see movies that depict the bucolic past — times from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance, I always wonder, “Where’s the filth? Where’s the famine? How are they handling the Black Plague off-screen?”
I read enough history and play enough Civilization VI to think about what it must have been like being an ancient Roman, subject to the vicissitudes of that year’s emperor, or the whims of the Inca leader who utterly controlled your fate. How was it to be pre-penicillin, pre-effective surgery, pre- the Enlightenment, and the idea of human rights?
Yes, by comparison to every other period in history, these are the good ol’ days. At the very least, these will be our good ol’ days.
So if these are the good ol’ days, maybe we should take a moment to recognize it.
And whatever isn’t so good? We could just work on that. Try to make it better. Try to take care of the future.
So that those can be good ol’ days too.