The Good Ole Days…
…probably weren’t all that good.
I’ve lived my life with blinders on. I’m not saying that’s a negative thing. In most cases I think it can be a good thing. But I’m beginning to question whether the good ole days were, in fact, so good.
The CBS Morning News has been updating a 20 year old story from California this week. When she was a small child, she was kidnapped and brought into the middle of nowhere where the abductor sexually molested her, brought her into an old abandoned mine, tied her to the tracks and left her for dead. By sheer luck, she was discovered before nightfall (when it was predicted that coyotes would have eaten her alive). Twenty years later she has grown up, graduated law school and was reunited on the CBS Morning News. A happy ending.
But this story got me thinking about “the past”. It is without exaggeration that I can say over 80% of my current friends (and people I’ve known over the years) had extremely dysfunctional childhoods. Their traumas have included emotional, physical and sexual abuse, neglect, kidnapping attempts, drugs, alcoholism, death and disease.
I suppose there’s a chance that perhaps I simply have a high number of friends with dysfunctional childhoods, but I doubt that’s the case. Rather, I think it’s the norm. And I don’t believe it’s a generational thing (such as my generation of children from parents of the drugs/hippie/free-love age) because the people I know range in age from 20 to 60.
A few months ago I got together with my best friend from childhood. We began discussing our pasts and she pointed out how the ideal childhood I recall is not exactly what was occuring around me. In her case, the mother was an alcoholic and the father (divorced) was an abusive adulturer. These things obviously affected my friend as a child…and when my friend reminded me of them 20 years later, I saw how they affected her, our friendship and her development. I knew about these things at the time (her mother was always drunk when I visited), yet over the years when I looked back at our youth, I recalled only the fun times, the silly things we did and the closeness we felt to each other.
I was one of the fortunate ones. Although my own childhood wasn’t perfect, at least there was no abuse or neglect. If anything, my parents were over-protective. But I even hear stories from them about their own childhoods (born during the Depression) that make me realize these are not recent issues. It’s just that these issues are no longer brushed under the carpet and treated as secrets.
So although today’s fast-paced society of being bombarded with computers and cell phones and TV/movie violence make people long for the good ole days of innocence…I wonder whether such days ever existed.
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Um, no.
It’s that the public sphere was spared having to know about it, by and large, because media was very different ‘way back when and “we” certainly didn’t discuss “those things”. I think that’s pretty much the big difference. Whereas today, you can see anybody doing anything just about anywhere and people make a living off talking about ‘those things’, in private or public.
In a possibly parallel situation, fans are always assuring the new generation just coming to opera that current singers are all well and good but could never equal the accomplishments of singers a quarter to a half century earlier. The more level headed simply sigh and say, “the “golden age” was always 25 years ago.
I think it depends on your experience. I wish it was the fun times that stuck with me. Unfortunately, at private moments what I remember is the waste of unique human lives and the awful tendency families have to devour their young.
This rings so clear with my way of thinking. I tend to remember the “good” times growing up. I’ve tried to figure out whether that’s just me, or whether it’s a reaction to my Mother who is the queen of remembering the “bad” times. In any case, as I look back, I don’t think I ignored the bad times as much as using them to learn from the experiences and to become who I am today (for better or worse). In short, I guess life was good and bad then, and it’s good and bad now. I’ll just live the best I can and hopefully find as much good as I can along the way.
Word.
You’re right Karl. Hindsight is always 20/20. People would like to believe that things were better in the good ol’ days, but it’s all perspective. Better for who? Things may have appeared better on the surface, because those things weren’t out in the open or often talked about. Now, it’s just more common to address these kinds of problems and admit they exist.
My first history professor started class by saying, “Let’s get things straight right from the start. The good old days…were not good. There was disease, famine, war, and poverty, just as there is today. The problem is in the politics of remembrance.” I’ve always remembered that, even 8 years later…and this fall when I teach my first history course, I’ll probably open with that. Because it says so much — we remember what we choose to.
It has only been in the last 15 years or so that it has become “OK” to honestly discuss the horrors inflicted upon children. It is nothing new — actually, that old saying “There is nothing new under the sun” is quite true. …Possibly only broken upon the arrival/birth of Bjork.
Anyway, yeah — I have always rather admired the way you have been able to wear those blinders. You are quite blessed to have such wonderful and loving parents. But, your childhood wasn’t all roses and wine.
Life if tough — the best we can do is get thru it and retain our humanity and caring for others. I think that is most likely the answer to that puzzle regarding the meaning of life.
I think the ‘good ole days’ happens to how one perceives it, and not so much as to actually what had happened.
I just learn what I can and share what I have.