rambling about nostalgia

[redbird]

browngirl has an interesting post in which she points out the flaws in a certain kind of nostalgia, the sort that sees seatbelts and lead-free paint as threats to, um, something or other.

Somewhere in the comments is the observation that people who talk about the wonders of the family of the past tend to stop dead when asked to specify what year they're talking about. Small wonder.

People want to live in a hypothetical, broadly sketched, past with all modern conveniences. They want to be rid of seatbelt laws, but probably not to drive a 1950s car, even a brand new one, but without the air conditioning or the modern brake systems. They want to use rollerblades without helmets or kneepads, not the old-style roller skates you attached to your sneakers with a key. And, of course, they want the Internet, cheap long distance phone calls and affordable air travel, and such.

The past is a foreign country, and they don't have tourist facilities.

Comments

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Y'know, it is just vaguely possible that this is not the best of all possible worlds, and that not all change is an improvement. Me, I very much prefer fields to tracts of houses, and I am one of the people who keeps signing petitions to keep Mountain Street in Sharon (the town I live in) from being paved. The people who live on the street like it the way it is. I like it the way it is. Good enough for me. How many places have to get loved to death before we get the point?

And one of the points of the essay everyone is deriding isn't that back when we weren't responsible, it was that back then we were expected to be responsible. Our grades, good or bad, were our fault. If we didn't do out homework, the school didn't change the rules for us so we didn't have deadlines anymore. If we found gym upsetting, we didn't get pulled out of it because it caused us emotional distress. If we did something dumb on the playground and got hurt, it was our fault. Our parents didn't go insist that the school remove the merry-go-round if we got hurt on it, they told us to play on it properly.

And of course mom wasn't there all the time. She had things to do. And so, for that matter, did we. Real honest-to-goodness work, not just violin lessons. Dishes to wash, gardens to weed, laundry to fold, walks to shovel, etc. No, we didn't like it, but we did it anyway (often under duress) because it needed to be done. Where is it written that the only things anyone has to do are the ones they like?

Precautions are good, but where do you stop? It is not possible to make everything perfectly safe. People are always going to get maimed and killed. Haven't most of us read SF stories where the protagonist does something like serve time for jaywalking because jaywalking is dangerous, and we must keep you from doing anything dangerous? If it's illegal to ride in the back of a pickup truck, howcome I can still take a shower?

I'm not claiming that my childhood was idyllic. I often say that the best thing about getting older is that it puts you that many years beyond being a kid. But there were some good things about it. And many of them weren't safe things.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Not all change is an improvement, but not all of it is bad, either.

I was thinking about my reaction to that forward, and to nostalgia in general, and part of my reaction is that the past is not divisible. If we bring back those halcyon days of wide open spaces, where do we put all the people who moved in meanwhile and caused the houses to be built? If we bring back the fun rides in the back of pickup trucks, are we willing to accept the occasional funerals when there's an accident? If we bring back the social attitudes of several decades ago, could you and I still be friends, would we even have met (remember how we met?)? And so on.

A.