The Good ‘Ol Days

How many times have you heard someone say, “I miss the good ‘ol days when things were less complicated, more honest, easier, and not so terribly wrong”. I have said it. You may have said it. I know I’ve heard my parents say it, but were they? Let’s take a look, then you decide.

I’m going to take you on a short walk through history so you can see what was so good about the days behind us. We won’t go far, but we could. Instead let’s start with the pilgrims and the Mayflower. This wasn’t your modern day cruise ship, all inclusive package with private staterooms, deck chairs, all you can eat, and onboard casino. No, the Mayflower was a cargo ship. Hauling passengers was not what it was designed for. The 102 passengers who made the 66 day voyage across the Atlantic didn’t do it in style, but rather squeezed together below deck where it was damp, cold, crowded, and miserable. The “all you could eat” menu wasn’t exactly all you could eat, and the choices were few. So few in fact as to not be any at all. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner consisted of hardtack biscuits, dried meat, and beer. Beer was considered safer than water since bacterial microorganisms can survive in water, but not in alcohol. I don’t like beer. Not even a little. Drinking beer every day would have been a horror. I would have made a better pirate than a pilgrim where rum was the beverage of choice. But not even beer, for those of you who enjoy a pint, could have made that voyage anything more than something to be endured.

Moving on to the frontier, pioneers, and wild west. This is my favorite time period. I used to think I would have liked living back then. Those people were tough and self sufficient. Doing what was right was a matter of honor, and honor was valued as much as gold. Let’s face it though, it was those long full dresses, made all the more beautiful, and princess like with layers of petticoats underneath that caught my eye when I was a young girl. I would have been thrilled to wear one of those, along with the pretty, yet practical sunbonnet that went with them. Never mind the weight, or the heat of all that fabric! I love reading Louis L’Amour, watching True Grit, the Magnificent Seven, and The Rifleman. Those were the days! Today though, instead of seeing that era through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia and the glamour of Hollywood, I see them through the eyes of age and experience, otherwise known as reality. Those lovely dresses dragged through dirt, mud, and manure. There was no running water and no electricity, which means there was no washing machine! Those big dresses and petticoats had to be handwashed and hung on a line to dry! If I see a label on clothes that says “handwash only”, forget it! I ain’t got time for that! The biggest issue, no indoor plumbing!!! I don’t even go camping anymore without demanding to know, “Are there flush toilets?” In case you men think this time in history was all about swaggering through the saloon doors with a revolver belted low on your hip, and bellying up to the bar for a shot of whiskey think again! Those guns weren’t for looking badass, nor was the rifle in the scabbard on your horse. They were for survival: game and varmits, not all of which were four legged. If you wanted to eat you were going to need to hunt and often, because there weren’t refrigerators either! However, there were stoves. The cast iron kind that needed to be fed wood or coal to keep them hot. You think preparing Thanksgiving dinner is a chore now?! Just how much wood does it take to keep the temperature precisely at 350 degrees for hours?! There were no dishwashers, except the two legged, two handed kind. We take a nice hot shower for granted, but no running water, meant no shower. If you wanted hot water for a bath you got that the same way you got hot water for those dishes, by pumping water from the well and building a fire! Good Lord, what was I thinking imagining I would have loved to live back then?! The innovations of the 20th and 21st centuries have made me soft!

Do you prefer the Roaring 20’s? That decade started off well enough with economic growth and widespread prosperity enjoyed by all. Seemed like everyone was having a good time, with the exception of that nasty thing called “Prohibition”. Bummer! The end of the decade, however, dove straight off a cliff with the Great Depression in 1929. That lasted 12 horrific years, ending with the advent of WWII. Speaking of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Or in this case, was it the other way around? Hard to tell. These poor people endured desperate times when there were no jobs and no money. Many lost their homes and didn’t have the means to feed their kids. In anguish they sent them away to orphanages or relatives that were better off. With WWII came jobs and the hope of getting back on their feet, but rationing goods for the war effort came with it, not to mention all the usual sacrifice and heartbreak that accompanies war! Hmmm….that was a long period of time that fell far from “the good ‘ol days” banner. There was nothing easy about them, and I for one do not want to repeat them!

Skipping ahead we have Vietnam, numerous race riots, the counter culture movement, and the Cold War. The apex of the Cold War was the fear of a nuclear attack, which led to school duck and cover drills. As if hiding under our desks would somehow protect us from nuclear holocaust, but it made sense against flying glass. I doubt broken glass would have been our biggest problem in the event of an actual attack, but it made us feel like we were doing something. Something was always better than nothing.

Violence has always been a part of history. As far back as we can go there has been good guys and bad guys. Some were very bad, some were heroic, and some straddled the line. They say Wyatt Earp might have been one of those in the middle. Maybe Doc Holliday too. There did seem to be less of the senseless violence that we see today against the innocent and defenseless, which I attribute to a breakdown in mental health care, but I’d have to research the past on that subject to see if it is actually true. Jack the Ripper of 1888 London comes to mind, so it wasn’t non-existent, but that’s a deep, dark hole I don’t want to peer into.

If we add in diseases like smallpox, polio, and the Spanish flu I believe you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who lived through those years to agree with you about how easy things used to be. So what makes us nostalgic about them? What makes us think that the past was any better, safer, or easier than the present? I found a lot of hardship in them.

It could be what we are really remembering is a past where we were young and the problems of the world were not ours to fix, or even deal with. We left that up to our parents and trusted that the toughest thing we would face was solving a math problem on the board in front of the whole class! That’s right, that was my nightmare! Pick your own poison.

I suspect the advent of rapid fire news communication is the real problem. We all know that inflation has stolen our dollar making things tough for a whole lot of people, and that there is a boatload of wacky going on in society today, but the 24/7, force fed news at a rate not possible earlier in history is coming at us all day, every day. How many newsworthy things could there possibly be to report all day long? News people are under pressure to produce, so they turn over rocks looking for anything to put out there, and lace it all with hyperbole to make you look. If you get sucked into their cyclone of bad events that’s all you can see and hear, and pretty soon you’re circling the drain with the absolute belief we are going to Hell in a handbasket! There’s no time to search for something good, look for the bright side, smell the roses, or believe that roses even exist anymore.

If you want to find hope and happiness I implore you to limit how many hours you spend a day listening, reading, watching, or having someone on social media regurgitate and interpret the news for you. If you can do that, I believe you will come to imagine that even today might eventually become one of the “good ‘ol days”. For every time and every season brings both struggles to overcome and reasons to celebrate. If it didn’t, if everything was easy and joyful, this would be heaven. And if this were heaven… well, you know what that would mean.