Caught in the rush of weeks and months that carry me like a solitary, bobbing barrel towards the potential Niagara Falls of my 70th year, I find myself more inclined to follow an impulse I’ve resisted my entire adult life: indulging in nostalgia. There it is, in my mind’s eye, that time when things were better, when I was young and vital, when all paths were opportunities and none led to dead ends.
It’s like that moment between sleeping and waking when a dream is all comfort and peace with only an occasional intrusion of reality (the real alarm clock ringing in the hazy dream). Everyone has their own “happy places.” One of mine places me as a boy under a blue summer sky in Iowa soon after dawn, with lush cornfields near enough to hide the mourning doves that repeat their melodic refrain over and over: hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. (My older brother mimicked them perfectly by cupping his hands and blowing into them, adjusting the pitch by raising a finger, but I never mastered the art.)
Some are politically inclined: the soaring feeling that Jackie and JFK could truly create a modern Camelot, with rain falling only at night; the moment when Richard Nixon resigned and I was proven worldly-wise rather than insanely paranoid; the triumph of Barack Obama’s election that helped me imagine a post-racial America.
I sometimes feel I’ve earned the right to wallow a bit in an air-brushed, rose-colored past. But I’ve continually resisted that siren song because I believe looking backward too often can keep me from looking forward. Recently I found that Marting Luther King Jr. counseled, ” . . . whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” (I believe in Satchel Paige’s warning as well: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”)
“What’s wrong with the younger generation?” has been a nostalgic attack on teens for centuries, including those of the 1950s and ‘60s who repeat it verbatim today. While millions of modern teens seem permanently attached to their couches and phone screens, there are millions more that think, create, strive, and succeed in ways that dwarf our teenage potential and accomplishments of fifty years ago.
Politically, nostalgia is dangerous as well. Dwelling on an imaginary past quickly leads to questions that beg for over-simplified answers: “Who took it away from me? Who destroyed the (imaginary) world I loved?” President Trump won the presidency by answering with lies and false scapegoats, and has criminally stoked the deadly fires of racism and misogyny ever since. “Make America Great Again” is a nostalgic call to the mid-20th century when rich white men ruled the political and social world and poor white men ruled their homes and families, when minorities knew their place and were brutally kept there, when women could be forcefully fondled and violently assaulted by the same white men without fear of anything like #MeToo.
I hope that Joe Biden can move beyond the nostalgic appeal of a decent, old man who has repeatedly overcome personal, family tragedies. He doesn’t back down from our bully-boy president, but risks relying too much on older voters who understand the context of working with segregationist Senators for a legislative cause. A campaign of nostalgia for a throwback (man or woman) focused on restoring civil debate, representing a diverse group of Americans rather than a base of angry white people, and restoring respect for America’s values and strengths holds little appeal for pragmatic young voters who need to look ahead for decades, not a few years.
Their experiences provide little hope that our government can pass legislation to reduce income disparity; reduce or prevent the slaughter of innocents with weapons of war; confront environmental and climate crises; fix a broken, inhumane immigration system; rescue young people from an ocean of student debt; and provide health care for those who are one illness or accident away from bankruptcy.
We need candidates with believable ideas and proposals to address these problems. Candidates need to tell us realistically how they will build the future rather than bring back an imaginary past or construct a flimsy, fanciful future.
Today’s world is one I could not have imagined forty years ago, the tide of progress ebbing rather than flowing, two steps backward defeating a single step forward. The one thing I’d like to retrieve from my fuzzy, nostalgic past is a belief that the future holds great opportunities, that we can improve the world that we, old and young, grew up in.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer and author living in Greenfield, MA. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.