BELIEVE IT. THE BEST TIME TO BE ALIVE IS NOW

By Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
Nostalgia is a powerful political tool. Wielding nostalgia for a bygone era — one that is invariably mischaracterized — is a favorite weapon for fascist movements, harking back to a time before their nation was “polluted” by malign forces. Even in a more benign form (e.g., “Politics didn’t used to be so mean,” “Remember the days of bipartisanship?”) plays on faulty memories. If you really go back to study U.S. history, you would find two things: The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.

The past was simply not “better” by any objective standard. Economically, we were all a lot poorer. “In 1960, there were roughly 400 vehicles per 1,000 Americans, about half of today’s car ownership rate. In other words, a family in 1960 could afford a car on one income, but today they would have two cars,” Matthew Yglesias wrote. Tom Nichols has written extensively on the politics of false memory. (“Times are always bad. Nothing gets better. And the past 50 years have not been a temporary economic purgatory but a permanent hell, if only the elites would be brave enough to peer through the gloom and see it all for what it is,” he wrote. “This obsession with decline is one of the myths surrounding postindustrial democracy that will not die.”)

Crime was higher by a lot in the 1970s. Poverty, child mortality, deaths from virtually any major disease, workplace injuries, high school dropout rates, etc., were all much worse in the 1950s. Also, kids got polio, Jim Crow was in full swing, gays had to be in the closet and no one had cellphones, home computers or microwave ovens. Very few people had air conditioning or could afford to fly.

You might rightly decry income inequality today. However, since 2007, income inequality has been on the decline. The 1930s? The Great Depression. You prefer the 1940s? World war. Then came McCarthyism and the Cold War. The 1960s? Riots, assassinations, the Vietnam War. You get the point. Though those who rail against modernity, urbanity, pluralism, tolerance and personal freedom in service of an authoritarian perch would like to turn back the clock, a perusal of history suggests now is the best time to be alive...continue reading

*this is an opinion piece and should not be considered an editorial from Prayables.