I was listening to one of those religous radio programs today and the preacher dude was talking about how things have gotten so bad these days. The topic being discussed is actually irrelevent; I was wondering about the line it’s self… we (society) are failing so bad at X, Y, or Z in recent times/nowadays…
Now has this line ever not been used as an attempt to bolster one’s point? I’m having a very hard time believing this is a new pattern of argument. I’ll bet that farmers and peasants in the 1400’s used this line on their kids, and that whoever wanted to lay a guilt trip on another group of people have said the same thing about how times were so much better about 20-60 years previously… “back when I was a kid in 220 AD everyone helped each other and lived right, but now in 245 AD society has lost it’s way and really slid downhill.”
Is this line of reason or example of one’s point valid? Things are constantly changing so I’m wondering if comparing those changes to the ways of a few decades ago can ever be proof of how the new way is bad?
I seem to recall seeing a quote about how disrespectful kids are to their elders and the speaker bemoaning the decline of civilization as we know it. Can’t remember who was quoted, but the speech was made sometime BC.
He calls it ‘More and more, about less and less’. Refering to the speed that information zooms around ‘now-adays’.
People are tending to make a big deal about nothing.
On the other hand, I was born in '60 and grew up in the country. It did seem simpler then. I used to target shoot .22s out of my bedroom window. I was taught how to drive when I was 10, and had a motorcycle when I was 11.
:sigh:
To me they where good old days. I think every generation will have them.
We see the past through rose-colored glasses. These “good old days” speeches are due to faulty recollection or ignorance about the past. We remember the golden autumn days and forget about how the haze of autumn was really air pollution.
Bad things tend to fade in our memory with the passage of time. Think really hard and you can remember a toothache from when you were a kid. But you don’t think about it that often, and the pain is not that vivid. It’s a survival mechanism.
We are led to believe that once upon a time all children were good, all brides were virgins, nobody beat his wife, and there were not so many crazy people. In reality, none of these things were ever true. To the extent that we don’t know about them it’s because (a) we forgot or (b) they were covered up and lied about.
Amen. I tried to make this argument once, and I got looked at sideways. Although I do see the point about “more and more for less and less”. I think we’re overextending ourselves, and I don’t see that as a good thing, but a quick look back shows that we’re not any worse off than we’ve ever been…and certainly better in some respects.
We’re better off in every respect now than we’ve ever been, but don’t expect people to ever admit that. People just like to complain even if life gives you nothing substantial to complain about.
Although I don’t think the old days was nearly as good as people make it out to be, at the same time I think kids are different than they were “back in the day”. And I’m not talking about my day, but the days of my parents and grandparents.
I have actually seen kids yelling at their parents out in public. I have heard parents carrying on conversations with their children as if they are intellectual and emotional equals. Many kids don’t seem to have a problem being straight-up rude to their elders. I don’t doubt kids were bad-behaving a long time ago, but I think adults were better respected “back in the day”. (It’s probably cuz adults were meaner “back in the day” :D)
I think parents had it easier a long time ago than parents nowadays, as far as controlling what information their children have access to. Before cable television, the worse a kid could come across was their father’s Playboy magazine. Now, you have to worry about kids making dates on the internet with pedophiles and downloading bomb-making instructions.
I think materialism has also changed. Fads have become more expensive. Back in my mother’s childhood, it was the norm to hold on to an automobile forever, until it broke down. Now, it’s almost normal for people to swap their cars every two years. There are presently more cars on the road than households in the US. You have middle-school kids carrying around $100 worth of electronic equipment to school (cell phones, CD players, game boys, etc.), and then coming home to beg for more. We’re constantly bombarded with advertising. We’re overloaded with information designed to affect our behavior. There was a time when this was not the case.
The past wasn’t all together “good”. Poverty was much worse. Sexism and racism and xenophobia were tons worse. People were probably more repressed and fake because of stricter social norms. People gave little lip service to mental illness and sexual abuse. But there were some good things about the olden days. These are the things I think people wax nostalgic about when they say the “good ole days”.
[Quote] “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
Roman scholar and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
I believe you’re thinking of a longer quote, though – one that was regularly featured in either the “Dear Abby” or “Ann Landers” column. Three or four clauses about the youth of today not listening to their parents, running wild in public, etc.
Billy Joel has said that he wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire after he was told by a high-school-age student that (quote not exact) “you were lucky to grow up in the fifties, when nothing much happened.” Joel’s incredulous response was along the lines of “Haven’t you ever heard of the Korean War? The civil rights struggle? The Hungarian Revolution?”
Several years before that, Mad magazine’s Dave Berg did a “Lighter Side of…” strip in which a father responded to his son’s comment that “you got to live in the good old days” by pointing out that the 1920’s had gangsters, the '30’s were marked by the Great Depression, the '40’s featured World War II, and the McCarthy era took up part of the '50’s. The concluding panel showed the father saying: “If anything, son, THESE are the ‘good old days’!”
Obviously, anyone who tells you that everything was better generations ago is engaging in selective memory. But anyone who pretends that nostalgia has no basis in fact is lying to you, too.
I have no desire to live in the 1930’s. In most respects, my life today is a lot better than it could have been then. And it’s a safe bet that most of the social pathologies we see today were around then, too. But Grandma isn’t full of beans when she tells you life was better, back then- she can point to a host of specific things that WERE better back then.
Wise guys and leftists may suspect that Grandma just misses the days when darkies knew their place… but maybe, just maybe, Grandma remembers the Thirties as a time when murders were almost unheard of, and nobody needed to lock their doors. Maybe she misses a time when neighbors all knew each other.
Again, I have no desire to return to the Thirties, and have no idea how to make that happen if I DID want it! But don’t kid yourself- some things WERE much better in the past.
Murders unheard of? When? Are you talikng about the pleasant 1930s, when Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde dominated the news? The 1950s, with Sam Shepherd and assorted family disputes making the headlines? (Suburban Detroit was “terrorized” by a random sniper after a woman was shot through her kitchen window while doing dishes. It turned out her angry teen son shot her.)
I still don’t lock my doors and I live within easy commute of downtown Cleveland. On the other hand, we always locked our doors as I was growing up, based on various experiences my Mom had had–including being lured away by a guy with evil designs on a motorcycle around 1920. (She was, fortunately, rescued before anything happened.)
I will grant the neighbors issue. With so many of us commuting from one suburb to another and forming social circles around work rather than community, we often do not get to know our neighbors.
I think it all depends on who you are too. I once read an article about nostalgia which pointed out that blacks and women never get nostalgic for the “good old days”.
If you are young, the good old days are right now.
Change is good. But change is bad if it isn’t as good as what used to be.
Old dude I am…when I was growing up, my grandmother used the “N” word for blacks. Fags were sickos, wifebeating was just a ruckus down the street, an un-wed mother was sent off to a home, girls were sluts if they had sex but guys were studs, there were no seatbelts in cars and people would die in minor car wrecks, drinking and driving was normal, kids got the “paddle” in high school by the principal, cancer of any kind was an immediate death sentence, no one ever talked about sex so Uncle Bob had free reign…
But on the flip side, we watched Wizard Of Oz on televison because there was no VCR/DVD and everybody watched it, Christmas brought neat gifts because your parents saved all year to buy that stuff, gas was 35 cents a gallon, ice cream was made fresh by the local shop, there was only one pizza place in town and it was great, it was cool to have a library card, people wrote letters, there was no terrorism or AIDS or driveby shootings, gangs were a bunch of kids who rode bikes and snuck a six pack of beer from Gary’s house and drank it in the woods.
The good old days were fun, but I wouldn’t want to go back. There was too much that wasn’t good in “the good old days”.
But the new old days have lots of good things going for it…I prefer to look ahead, but retain my right to bitch. My bitch of the month is that I still think it is shocking that university age students seem to be either politically unaware, or apathetic to what is going on right now. In the “good old days” we were mobilized.
I think youth itself is what a lot of people, throughout history, actually miss. Especially in modern times, when most youth lived off their parents, hung out with their friends, and just experienced a lot of things for the first time, while being totally oblivious to the negative aspects of a lot of those things.
By the time they become true adults, with jobs and their own families, people come to realize that a lot of things - even the things that were wonderful when they were young - are not exactly what they seem.
Unfortunately, a lot of people, once they’re able to identify and understand the bad things in the world, tend to forget that good things still exist, and they only remember the good things from their youth.
Men had neat 3-piece suits, and those hats! Wide brim fedoras=and white too (in the summer). I liked the 1930’s cars too-running boards! You could jumpon the running boards and yell “follow that car!”
I liked 30’s jazz as well, and we had the “Three Stooges”.
Of course, if you were unemployed in the 30’s,life could be pretty rough…my grandfather remembered lines of unemployed men waiting for a bowl of soup.
Well, ya can’t have everything!
In one of his essays, Andy Rooney says “It’s amazing how long the world’s been going to hell in a handbasket without ever having gotten there”.
IMHO, the good stuff we have now far outweighs the good stuff we had “in the good old days”. I say this from a very personal perspective, too. As a SAHM, not only wouldn’t I have had anything like the SDMB, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have had time to enjoy it; housewives a hundred years ago spent from sunup to sundown tending to the needs of the house and the family. Then again, if I’d lived a hundred years ago, I probably never would have been a wife or mother, because my first blood infection, at age 17, would have killed me.
I would not have lived past the age of about 10 in any time more that 50 years ago, and even if I had lived, none of my children would have survived infancy. I like now, I am alive.
This reminds me of a few decades ago, when I was teaching a class of 9th graders. Their book included an inspirational story about a man who became a success despite a childhood bout with infantile paralysis. The term was footnoted as polio. The students were equally stumped by that word. Finally one recalled his baby brother getting an immunization for that disease. We had a wonderful discussion about medical advances in the previous 100 years. One of the class had recently returned from an appendectomy. When they realized that without 20th century medicine she would have almost certainly died a miserable death from peritonitis, the point was really made.
