Are these the good old days? Will future generations look back yearning for 2020 and early 2021?
That seems unfathomable, now doesn’t it?
Here’s some background concerning my personal good old days.
I’ll have to plug you into my autobiography for a bit.
I was born in 1956 into a middle-class home in Elba, Alabama. I grew up an only child.
Daddy worked at the post office. He wasn’t a mail carrier, but a clerk. Maybe “head clerk,” whatever that meant.
Mama taught school. Mostly sixth grade, and mostly geography, history, and civics.
I was a repulsively good child. I was benignly spoiled. As that only child, I recognized early on that I didn’t need to screw up the deal I had. So I was good. Actually, that wasn’t a challenge. Whatever rebellion I had was mostly internalized.
I didn’t smoke, and this was back when smoking was a national pastime. It just seemed gross. I wasn’t interested.
I didn’t drink. The couple of times I tasted alcohol it was just nasty. Cokes were much tastier. Again, this was a non-issue. Not even close to being a temptation.
Drugs. Oh, please. Really? Hard no on that one.
I did like girls a lot. Tempted? Well, yeah. But I managed to keep things on the proper side of restraint and righteousness.
See what I mean? I was repulsively good. Maybe that’s why I consider those the good old days because they were.
That’s not to say that I didn’t have issues. We all have issues, do we not? It’s just a matter of degree and type.
It took me a long time, well into adulthood, for me to realize what being an introvert was. I thought it was a character flaw, because societal expectations meant that you were to be engaging, and social, and chatty.
I could pull those traits off. Still can. But after a period of extroverting, I have to go lay down. I’m spent.
Introversion isn’t a flaw any more than having blue eyes instead of brown is. It’s just a thing. I”ve made peace with that. And I’ve discovered (and even “tested out”) that I am a textbook empath. Not only to I know how you’re feeling, I feel how you’re feeling. I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. It does explain how, in ministry, I’ve proven to be a lousy hospital visitor. I just want to climb in the next bed and be sick along with you.
All that’s to say that in those good old days I felt like a perpetual outsider, whether in reality I was or not. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere.
Waaaahhhh.
Those good old days, if you want to put calendar dates on it, would be roughly the period from 1964 through 1974.
If I were to step outside myself and be objective, historically there wasn’t a lot of good things happening on the world and US stage.
In 1964 we had the Vietnam war escalating. Three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi and the president signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, but that didn’t stop the violence. The Warren Commission released its report on JFK’s assisination.
1965 – Selma to Montgomery and Bloody Sunday. The Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Race riots in Watts, California. Vietnam continued to roil.
1967 – Six Day War. 40,000 anti war protestors in San Francisco. State bans on interracial marriage ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (which was a good thing, but violently unwelcomed in many places.)
1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated. Hong Kong flu pandemic. Robert Kennedy assassinated. US soldiers massacre men, women, and children in My Lai.
1971 – the New York Times releases sections of the Pentagon Papers, revealing that the US government had lied to the American People about the Vietnam war, among other issues.
1972 – Munich Olympics Terrorist Attack. George Wallace shot. Antiwar demonstrations draw 100,000. Watergate.
1973 – Roe v. Wade.
1974 – Nixon resigns in disgrace. Inflation tops 11.3% in the US and 17.2% in the UK, and the global recession deepens. I graduate from high school.
Those were the good old days, at least in my worldview.
So are these the good old days for this generation?
I’ll go with a qualified “it depends.”
I’m struggling for some perspective here. My thought is that things were awful then, they are awful now, and may be “awfuller” in days to come.
But my good old days sentiment isn’t based on “things.”
Rather, my good old days are based in relationships. Autumn days, when the leaves are falling and the wind sighs through the trees. Catching lightning bugs in jars and releasing them in the Elba Theater during a movie. Camping out in the back yard with the guys. Swimming in White Water Creek or the frigid water of the city pool. Football games as part of the Elba High Marching Tigers.
And, again, relationships. My high school “posse.” We’ve stayed in touch all these years. We’re creeping up on our 50th high school reunion in three years. Simply amazing to think about.
See, it’s not the things happening on the national stage that dictate what the good old days are. It’s the little things.
It’s what Russell said in Pixar’s Up: That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most.
Look. On the surface, 2020 was perfectly awful for most of mankind. You weren’t singled out for individual abuse. We all faced the same nasty microscopic enemy.
Let’s check back with our current crop of teenagers in about 20 years. They’ll be joking about runs on toilet paper, and having to miss graduation, and masks making a fashion statement.
What they’ll remember – and fondly – is how their relationships stayed intact even with physical challenges. They’ll remember what it was like to finally get to hug Grandma again. They’ll remember what it was like to finally get to sit in a football stadium again and cheer (or at least hang out.)
Get it? The good old days are a state of mind. A choice, if you will.
You can make what you wish out of what is happening in your life. To the best of my ability, weak as it can be, I am embracing these days because I never walked alone.
When it comes to relationships, it has been my relationship with God Himself that has sustained me. See? In that sense, every day, in some way, has the potential of being a good old day.
Sweet.