Saints and Sinners: A need to return to the ‘good ole days’
When my sister was 13 or 14, I can remember her going up to our mother and lamenting, “Mama, I have nothing to look forward to.”
The whole world today is in the same fix as my sister was. We have nothing to look forward to. We can all put up with rainy days when the forecast for tomorrow is sunny skies. But, when the clouds return after the rain and the prospect is for more of the same all week, our spirits dip. That is the situation we appear to be in.
There may be signs of an economic recovery on the far horizon, but we will put off celebrating until the next quarter’s earning reports and unemployment figures are in.
After 9/11, we thought we could look forward to a new era of civic togetherness. But, as a people, we are getting meaner and more short-tempered with one another. A survey shows that almost 80 percent of us feel that a lack of respect and common courtesy is a serious problem in the United States — and it’s getting worse.
Examples abound. Two women got into an argument on a supermarket checkout line. It got so heated that one of the women went to her car, got a hammer out of the trunk and smashed her antagonist’s headlight.
Worst-case scenario: People are afraid that suicide bombers will make their way to this country.
Well, if there is nothing good to look forward to, maybe we can look back to the past in order to regain our sanity. Maybe we can bring it back. There are signs that this is what we may be attempting to do.
Mikey is sampling the Life cereal again on TV commercials — and “He likes it!” Mr. Whipple is warning his customers not to squeeze the Charmin. The yawning Maytag repairman has his feet up again waiting for customer complaints that don’t come in.
To remind us how good the past could be, we are eating foods that were our favorites in the good old days. On the menu at an upscale Chicago restaurant are such 1940s and ’50s cuisine as stuffed peppers, chicken pot pie, turkey with mashed potatoes, chipped beef on toast, meatloaf, grilled cheese sandwiches, egg salad on Wonder Bread and hash with poached eggs – all washed down with a milkshake.
And, “Jello-O again.” Even Jack Benny’s favorite can be seen on the dessert carts at some of the nicer restaurants. Diners are homesick for Chef Mom, who never heard of beef carbonnade, asparagus al dente or pommes frites.
Some people say that the “good old days” is just a nostalgic saying for a time that never was. They may be wrong, however. There was a time, says James Collier in his book, “The Rise of Selfishness in America” (Oxford Press, 1991), when the great mass of Americans lived in a social order that was predictable, stable and basically decent.
Although longing for that world won’t bring it back, nostalgia can be more than just a romantic looking backward to “the big band sounds” of the 1940s.
“Finding ourselves not in the world we love but knowing how deeply we love it,” says novelist John Cheever, “there is kindled within us the conviction that we will discover the way to return to it in the future.”
If our “dream is behind us,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald has his hero say in “The Great Gatsby,” the answer for us may be to turn around and recapture the dream. What happened to the “good old days”? Did you and I contribute to their passing? (What was it Edmund Burke said about “good men who do nothing”? Was he talking about us?)
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)