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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.
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no subject
Manly men who want to show their masculinity by not wearing seat belts should be allowed to do so, especially before they have a chance to breed.
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Seat belt laws
I still wear them.
I'm not in favor of laws requiring the use of safety devices by private persons (barring children. They're not able to decide for themselves and SHOULD be in car seats/seat belts/whatever).
However, I do use them.
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I think, in general, people just want to regain that lost childhood, where life seemed simpler and easier than it is now--not because it actually was, but because of who they were when they perceived it.
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no subject
...yet...
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long ago
Oh, I think this is right on! For a lot of people. Although it's a bit different when it comes to my mom, who is 80. She literally wants 1959 back again-- before all "these weirdos" moved in, before her town got "so overdeveloped" (in other words, when there were a few houses and a lot of fields and only gravel roads). If you mention the dangerousness of the old cars, she contends that her Corvair "was just the nicest car to drive, and Nader took them away."
There literally is no argument you can use with her, although once I said, "If you could go back then now, wouldn't you miss your microwave?" That actually gave her some pause.
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no subject
I hate the legislative padding of all the corners of the world.
As was being discussed in someone else's journal, law is not a substitute for education. I grew up in a house with unlocked firearms and I never did anything stupid because I was taught not to.
I have lights on my bike and wear a helmet not because it's the law but because not to is STUPID.
...and I'm not convinced that everything we've been doing to protect the stupid is a good thing.
Hell, if I had to sit in a kids seat in the car until I was (what's it now, 7??), I'd have been really unhappy.
Yes, it could be argued that protecting kids from stupid parents is good, but setting things up so that they never learn that the world has corners isn't.
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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.
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Re: Seat belt laws
If the law demands that they wear a seatbelt, it makes it easier to insist that they do.
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on reflection...
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Re: long ago
And fields are a very good thing. They're where food comes from.
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Re: long ago
(a)microwaves are wonderful
or
(b)fields are bad.
Merely that my mother likes them both. I regret if my post was not clear enough.
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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.
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no subject
It's not really the same thing, but if I got the chance to go back in time to my childhood with at least a modicum of what I've learned, I'd grab it in a heartbeat. Roller skates and lead paint and all. I'm not really unhappy with my life, but an awful lot of what I regret dates back to then.
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Yeah, this is exactly it. And, like a foreign country, the past is all of one piece; one can't *have* the nice bits of, say, the Fifties without the bad bits. That last bit is, I guess, the fear that underlies my annoyance with some kinds of nostalgia; I wonder if people who practice it *would* willing trade things like easy birth control and the Internet and the ability of my friends to hold a same-sex wedding, for their idealized past back.
I don't know whether to hope that the past manages its tourist facilities, or that that *never* happens.
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Not roll back gay rights. Not do away with what little racial equality we have in this country (I don't claim to speak from any great fount of knowlege here, but it doesn't seem like we've done very well yet). Not send anyone back to the kitchen who doesn't want to go (although acknowleging that some people would really rather be in the kitchen than in the boardroom would be nice).
And we already live with funerals resulting from unsafe behaviors. I remember a teenager getting killed while rock climbing up home a few years back. She was very well-lliked and many people were sad. And snippy's niece wasn't killed when she fell off her horse, but she could have been. I'm not prepared to say that no one may climb rocks or ride horses, though. Or, for that matter, hike, or ski, or fly in airplanes. IMO, the definition of "unnecessary risk" is one that everyone needs to make for themselves. Fuzz factor for children, yes, but I think everyone agrees that the banner call of "Protect the children!" can be carried way too far.
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And time-traveling in the other direction, I often wish my mom, who died in 1986, had lived long enough to have access to the Internet. She would have loved it.
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no subject
I certainly agree with you there, and the rest of this comment.:) I certainly don't want a cottonball world either.
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On the other hand, in 2001 I don't think I'd met
Time isn't divisible, tempting though the fantasy is of going back a couple of years and rewinding so we only get the good parts.
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Re: Seat belt laws
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Re: long ago
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Re: Seat belt laws
As far as I can see, in the UK, not wearing a seatbelt is a masculinity thing; I have known a large number of men who avoid it whenever they can get away with it.
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Re: long ago