A friend and I occasionally discuss the idea that we often harbor nostalgia for a past that never existed. We mean this in both a historical and personal sense. We might listen to an old song or walk along city streets in autumn and feel an aching for an era before our birth. We fantasize about living in that world, interacting with its populations, and belonging somewhere comfortable, simple, and yet also ephemeral. Maybe it's because we are atheists. Maybe we still need to feel that something is greater than us, something is significantly unattainable.
Historical memory is essentially the idea that each generation yearns for a time in their youth, or even before, when things were somehow 'better'. You might hear your grandparents, parents, even an older sibling talk about the "good old days" or better yet, "When I was your age..." in order to make very far-fetched comparisons between your quality of life and the quality of life in the "good old days". The idea is compelling, if it were only true.
I admit it. I would relish standing on the sidewalk of an urban thoroughfare in 1950 amongst good friends and neighbors, watching a ticker-tape parade go by, then heading in for a quick soda followed by a very innocent sock-hop. The night would end with a romantic walk home along the safe city streets and a climatic good night kiss. Better yet, take me to the roaring '20s where I break off my engagement to a rich steel tycoon in order to smoke, drink, and dance the nights away in a Harlem speakeasy. I engage in passionate love tangles with black jazz artists and poets, leaving them only my pantyhose the next morning. These memories, obviously they do not exist and I will never really possess them. But how I feel them! They are more real to me than my own memories. Even for folks who tell stories like this, the era, the actual everyday life was probably nothing like this. In these times, women were fighting for either the right to vote, or the right to work. Blacks and minorities were under harsh and inhumane oppression. There was severe economic disparity between the rich and poor and the economy was ready to collapse. Everyday people were being questioned, put on trial, and labeled as "unamerican". Modern medicine, modern education, modern sanitation, all of it ceased to exist as it does today. When I take a closer look at my fantasy of a time gone by, I engage in these special moments of parades and speakeasies but fail to realize that I would normally be heading to an awful, underpaid job sewing a tiny piece of fabric on hats, or worse, heading home to a drunken, abusive husband with no ability to divorce without being impoverished as a community pariah. Clearly, life was not always so dismal and there are certainly areas in our modern day society that have not been touched by the neoliberal idea of chronological "progress" in history but rather by setbacks. Just as an example, worker's rights and unions and the ability to own and operate successful small businesses have been crushed in the last 30 years.
But what purpose does the warped historical memory serve? Well, it certainly makes older generations feel like moral and more upstanding citizens than their modern counterparts. It also transfers any and all blame, they don't feel as if it is their fault that the world is currently crumbling to pieces. Grandmom remembers sock-hop stories but probably doesn't remember her father espousing apocalyptic rhetoric in the aftermath of the Great War, the Holocaust, the Red Scares, the riots at Newark and Berkeley, The World Trade Center bombings, the Bush dynasties. You see where I am going? Furthermore, little does Grandmom remember her mother's outrage when Elvis hit the stage with hips a-swinging, Beatlemania, Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, N.W.A, and Myspace. These analogies are cliche, but every generation seems to believe the apocalypse stands before our feet. Even our older siblings complain that we don't remember how great aspects of life were before the Internet and how wide the gap between the generations has grown. Ok, so they might make a decent argument but the point I am making is that they separate themselves, we did this but you do that.
So now, reality. The world is not crumbling any worse than it ever has been, there will most likely be no apocalypse. We are a race of humans who have withstood millenia of war, persecution, corruption, poverty, disaster, and disease; most of it has been generated by our fellow men. While we should always fight for our fellow countrypeople, perhaps part of the reason we have failed at the very significant change we need is because of our flawed historical memory. We don't really want to "go back" to the way things were because the imagined community was just that, imagined. (thank you benedict anderson) However, what our older generations do give us when they ponder the "good old days" is that despite all of the hard struggle growing up, what they remember feeling is comfort, hope, and solidarity in their communities. So while I like to reminiscence about the "good old days" I never experienced, maybe concentrating on the feelings associated with that nostalgia would provoke me to actually feel kinship with the present, maybe to even help change it.
I cannot apply my reasoning indefinitely, eventually human life on Earth will cease to exist. So, one generation out of thousands will have it right. As a risky sort, I am going to gamble that it won't be mine or yours.
ps: painting done by Luke Chueh