Ah, Those Were The Days!!

I remember…
Memory is a funny thing. It lives somewhere in the mind alongside colors and taste and imagination.
When I was a kid, my friends and I would spend hours drawing flying saucers. In the early 1960s science fiction was a growing genre that was sprinkled like so much fairy dust on our growing and developing little gray cells. We drew them just like they were portrayed on T.V. and in the movies. One long, narrow oval with a small dome on top.
Think of the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” How cool was Gort! We all wanted him as a friend.
“Mom! Can I stay up and watch T.V.?”
“No, Honey. It’s time for bed.”
“Gort! Go get her!”
Oh, yeah, I coulda used a buddy like that!

That’s how memory works.
Our minds are imprinted with information from every minute of every hour of every day of our lives. All of that information is retrievable.
But, none of it can help us to actually relive that time.
We cannot go back to that place.
The colors and smells and Feelings we experienced are backed-up on hard drives of flesh that reside within a thin layer of bone and fluid.

We like to think that memory is 20/20.
That those images and other sensory data that was stored within the folds of our minds is infallible is one of the fallacies that those same minds produce.
No one’s memory is infallible.
I think that even people with perfect recall, those who have what’s called a ‘photographic’ or long-term eidetic memory may see images or recall data. But, the ability to truly relive any given moment in time by remembering it doesn’t really exist. At least not for us mere mortals.

If true and complete memory does not exist, what about something like Nostalgia?

We all have moments when we glance back into our history and feel a touch, a longing for the ‘Good Ol’ Days.’ Don’t deny it! You do, too!
For a lot of folks these feelings create warm and fuzzy feelings. That’s what nostalgia does. Particularly, when society and culture are in flux.
I think back to my youth in the 60s when Civil Rights, the Viet Nam war,and Feminism were in the news cycle daily. My Dad and his friends longed for the days of Eisenhower when houses with white picket fences surrounded gardens of bright flowers and there was an apple pie cooling on the kitchen window. It so much better then! There wasn’t any of this demonstrating or riots or uppity Women.

Nostalgia.

One scholar, Svetlana Boym, quoted in https://thewayofimprovement.com/2020/07/22/nostalgia-for-a-past-that-never-existed/
wrote, “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”
With that in mind, we can think of Nostalgia kind of as a fear response to progress.
Progress = Change and
Change = ???
I think that we human critters are by nature afraid of change.
At least, it takes an effort to make a leap and embrace it.

Why mention all of this?
Yesterday I wrote a rather scathing piece about White Evangelicalism and politics.
Both groups that I accused of being in bed together are steeped in, c’mon you can guess!
Yep!
Nostalgia!

I don’t want to over-simplify a very complex issue involving feelings and memories and life experience.
However, if we even Could turn back time and flip all of those calendar pages back, we wouldn’t find that idyllic streetscape with all of the flowers and birds and dogs yapping gaily around us. We wouldn’t find Mr. & Mrs. Cleaver in their suit and dress with impeccable hair.
We would find reality.
A place where bullies roamed the schoolyard and bosses assaulted their secretaries.
We would find grit in our eyes from the nearby coal-fired power plants and the newspapers and T.V. news would reveal the dark underbelly of business and politics.

There is no going back.

Period.

Society and culture move forward to some as yet unknown vista.

With the support of family, friends, benevolence, and most of all Love we must look past the Past and, together, embrace God’s future.