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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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What if ‘the Good Old Days’ were never as good as you remember?

By David McElroy · March 27, 2019

When I was young, my father used to tell me stories about growing up in Birmingham. He rode streetcars around town by himself at a young age. (That was typical for kids then.) And he would tell me stories about his early jobs working as an usher for movie theaters downtown.

The best theaters in town were on Third Avenue North. Today, the Alabama Theatre and the Lyric Theatre — seen in this 1955 photo — are wonderfully restored and regularly used for concerts and movies. I’m pretty sure my father worked at both of them in the late 1940s.

He never told me that the years of his youth in Birmingham were “the good old days,” but he was clearly nostalgic for them. He enjoyed his experience of growing up in a bustling and active city, living around a vibrant downtown.

I hear a lot of people longing for the days of their past in similar ways, but many of them take it much further. They openly long for “the good old days.” They believe that the days gone by were great. They believe the America of their memory was great.

This nostalgia — combined with a fear of constant rapid change — makes some of them eager to to return to the past they imagine. To these people, “Make America Great Again” is an emotional call to a past which they imagine was idyllic.

My understanding of history leads me to believe there has never been a time in the past which was better than today. If you look at the past as “the good old days,” you’re seeing the warm emotional memories of your past through rose-colored glasses.

The past wasn’t so great, on balance. By comparison, the present is fantastic, even though we still have monumental challenges about how to deal with difficult problems.

One of my favorite musical artists of the last decade has been John Paul White. He lives and works in Florence, Ala., and he was half of the Grammy-winning band, the Civil Wars, until their break-up. His second solo album since then is due out next month and the opening track of that album really connected with me when I first heard it Sunday. It’s called “The Good Old Days,” and it’s embedded below.

In the song, White acknowledges the eagerness of many in his native South to embrace a return to something nostalgic in the past, but he points out that the past was a place where individuals weren’t seen as having equal worth — and he argues that we have far to go:

It’s taken oh so long
For the world to start to understand
The true and equal worth
Of every woman and every man
We got so very far to go
So tell me something I don’t know
What’s so good about the good old days?

“It’s really me wondering,” White told American Songwriter magazine last week, “what era of America are people wanting to get back to? I’m having a hard time thinking of one we haven’t progressed from, or shouldn’t progress from. As a father, I see the world through their eyes and I’m wondering what we’re leaving for them, what they’re heading into, and how it can be improved upon — and how it can be improved upon for every single person on this earth and not just a select few. This song is my counter-argument to Making America Great Again.”

When I was at dinner Tuesday night, I sat at a table next to an elderly black woman and her college-age granddaughter. The older lady and I chatted for awhile. She was smart and funny and personable. I enjoyed her company.

In the “good old days,” this sweet lady and I couldn’t have eaten side by side, because the law required we be separated.

If she lived in the Birmingham of my father’s youth, she wouldn’t have been able to sit with white patrons in the movie theaters where my father worked as an usher. She wouldn’t have been able to sit next to him on the public streetcars. When she went home, she would have gone to neighborhoods which were inferior to the ones in which my father and other white people lived, because the law ensured that she was kept away from white neighborhoods.

Those wouldn’t have been “good old days” to her, at least not in many key respects.

Today isn’t perfect and not every change over the years has been positive. But we are more educated than ever before. We live more comfortable lives than ever. Even the poorest among us today are better off than those of a century ago. We have more social mobility than ever before.

This is the best that human life has ever been. We have never had so much choice about what to become or how to live our lives. Only a short-sighted person — and one whose memory is clouded by nostalgia — could believe the world of the past was truly better.

There are a lot of things about today which we can argue about — and even fight about. Those on the progressive left want to force change in directions that seem dangerous to me. Those on the conservative right often want to return to a utopian past which never existed except in their fantasies. We will continue to butt heads as we work out how to get to a better future.

I believe things are going to get ugly in my lifetime, because I think there will be economic and political collapse, followed by a lot of painful societal restructuring. Is that scary? Yes. But it’s no different from what has happened throughout human history. And every time we have gone through upheavals, we have found ways to come out better than we were before.

In another interview last week, John Paul White explained where the idea for “The Good Old Days” came from.

“This song came out of nowhere,” he told The Country Note. “The title of the song was born of a conversation with my wife, Jenny. We were reminiscing about harder times in the past, moments where we struggled to get by. I said derisively, ‘Ah, the good old days.’ And we both thought, why do people say that? The last thing I’d want to do is go back and relive it. These are the good days. The best, I’d like to believe, are yet to come.”

We might argue and fight about what life ought to be, but the most optimistic and truthful thing we can say is that today is the best life has ever been — and that the future will be even better.

Donald Trump became president by appealing to the desires of a lot of frightened people to return to something they see as more stable and more solid. But the “great” past he preaches never really existed. Those of us who hate certain things about modern culture won’t find salvation in returning to a non-existent past.

Our salvation will come only by building an even better future.

Looking to the past is not the way to deal with our problems or our fears. We have to face the change all around us and find ways that we can all live in peace among each other — and part of that starts with letting others live the way they want to live, while we ask nothing of them but to be allowed to live our own lives, too.

The Trump political movement will be a short-lived thing, because it’s a dead end. People will soon discover that there’s no great past to which to return.

Our best days are still ahead. We have to build a better world. One day, maybe current reality will be as great as nostalgia makes the past appear to be.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: birmingham, history, make America great again, nostalgia, psychology, trump

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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