Election years always bring out a fond nostalgia for “the good ol’ days” — the simpler times when the cost of gas was in single digits, people could go without locking their doors at night, the marriage bed was actually two singles separated by a tasteful Pepto-pink nightstand. Ah, the bliss.
The often-accommodating afterthought is that “there was a time when we could disagree and get along,” and “this generation is leading us to ruin.”
I can see the allure to these thoughts; hindsight is always more charming in our memories than in reality, particularly when we’re looking back to our youth.
We were full of life without the aching joints, blissfully ignorant to so much, and the mere hope of progress was still as affordable as gas in our never-before-needed hybrid tanks.
But … were they the best of times?
I asked myself this after watching a documentary on the ’90s, which was my “best of times.”
I recalled it fondly as an awakening of my own understanding of human rights, my aspirations to blossoming adulthood and the achingly bittersweetness of falling in and out of love, all set to the soundtrack of Beck, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Mazzy Star (and gas was $1.23).
It was also an age of “Girls Gone Wild,” of oversexualizing the stereotypical female “form” as merely a vessel for the convenience of robust, growing boys.
Date rape was a rite of passage for most girls in high school, with the glowing assurance that we would grow out of this and into a career where it was simply expected that a woman would have to perform inhumane acts to succeed in business for 70% of what your male counterpart was making.
Noncompliance was to be labeled a “prude” or “probably a lesbo.”
Which is another thing: You couldn’t be gay. Period. Unless the robust boys wanted to watch you make out with someone same-sex; then you could be slightly gay at their pleasure when it suited them, as long as you understood you were not to enjoy it more than they saw fit.
Those good old days. How could I possibly have wanted to progress past such utopian times?
What I have discovered throughout the rose-tinted flashbacks is that while we remember our best of times, we have conveniently forgotten whom we were beating down in their worst of times.
We grumble about a time when women didn’t have to work, forgetting that those women couldn’t get a charge card, file a police report after a beating or claim rape against her husband.
Pay was less than 50% of what a man made, with most educations and careers immediately stricken from the thought of pursuit. But what a great time for male reinforcement, and gas was only 27 cents.
Time machine, here I come!
Or perhaps it was a time of segregated water fountains, of churches with Black children still inside being bombed, of lynch mobs that demanded blood when a young Black boy was accused of whistling at a white waitress.
But, oh, the freedom of being able to make a racist joke without everyone being all uppity and offended. What beautiful times those were.
When everyone wasn’t so gosh-darn offended, so you could bully to your heart’s content because mental health and suicide rates weren’t something you talked about. You could laugh at someone for being the “R” word. Ha ha.
Perhaps it was at the height of the AIDS pandemic, as the gay population trembled in fear watching all those they loved, who had already struggled and suffered massively, now physically weakened and wheezing until the life ceased to flow through them.
The police brutality at Stonewall, the tear-streaked face of Matthew Shepard against the barbed wire fence, an entire community terrorized for decades for the simple act of loving unlike the norm.
But we didn’t have to, um, be forced to see rainbows everywhere, I guess.
Every era had its feelings of the sun on our face and a closeness to God. All we needed to achieve it was to stand on someone’s neck to get a little higher and, of course, act completely without godliness.
We forget. We’ve forgotten. Maybe and most likely, some of us never even realized that obtaining our greatest dignities came at the cost of the voiceless we robbed.
Maybe this generation isn’t the worst; maybe they’ve figured it out. And we really do not want that brought to our attention, because what kind of monsters does that make us in our own fairy tale?
What we see as annoying and overly sensitive and too quick to offend, they see as unjust, inhumane and non-negotiable. What we always held as truthful and funny and blatantly our right to say, they’re proving is hurtful, inciting and damaging.
This generation isn’t letting us follow our usual path of painting a pretty pretense and keeping up neighborhood BBQ appearances while we secretly slice each other in our sleep with the skewers.
They’re making us open up and admit we’re supporting the people who are pushing political agendas that destroy their lives, their families and their marriages because they’re different from our own.
And we’re somehow indignant at them for this demand for honesty. (We try to deflect by calling it hate and intolerance, but it’s simple transparency. The hate is in the acts of intolerance, and we’ll call them hateful for pointing it out.)
“Woke” isn’t a bad word to them; we made it that way because we know we lose when we’re aware. When we have to be not only mindful but we have to allow the thoughts and feelings and rights of others to be placed, not above our own, but for the first time in the same equality as our own. And what do we become then, when our marriage, our religion, our way of life have to stand on their own merit in equality and existence to those who reflect the opposite?
We’ve always had someone else’s neck to stand on; we’re afraid of what will happen when we have to stand on our own two feet. Afraid we’ll be buried and bullied and find ourselves in the minority, which is the most horrific thought of all, because we see how we treated minorities.
This generation isn’t about to fail; they’re ready to stand, and they’re finding a way to do it without exacting a human toll in their era.
There will be setbacks, losses, failures that feel like the resurgence of another “good ol’ era,” but that’s the essential of any historical revolution — the fall before the uprise.
We’ll resist and we’ll grumble, and we’ll use all of our aging strength to pull them back. But still they’ll propel forward as we choke and sputter the death rattle sung by every generation before us that detested letting go of all the miserable attributes that kept us slaves to this broken system.
And what glory days those will then be.
Jama Ross is a Fort Wayne resident and writer.
