The Ol’ Days

Women of my mother’s generation did not enjoy the household luxuries we take for granted today: the clothes dryer, the dishwasher, and so on. Homemakers made do with what they had, expending a lot of energy in their daily tasks. Luckily, little by little things improved.

            Few people would want to go back to those labor-intensive ol’ days, yet most of us mourn some aspect of the past which we somehow feel would make our lives better today. Pangs of nostalgia seem to be most common when the cost of things is on the carpet. Someone will inevitably say: I remember paying less than 50 cents for a gallon of gas.

            Nostalgia has a way of being selective, though. We tend to forget what the minimum wage was in the ol’ days. We tend to glorify only the memories which seem to prove the argument of the moment. For example, we may complain about today’s ethics by comparing them to a time when concern for others was, we feel, the norm rather than the exception. However, we tend to forget that some of the attitudes of the past were grossly narrow-minded.

            In the ol’ days, society through its better-than-thou authority figures, often sat in judgement over those who were different, making their lives miserable if not a living hell. In the ol’ days, prices might have been cheaper, but when it comes to certain attitudes, we could very well call them the dark days. It is a time not everyone would wish to relive.

           Of course, it could be argued that faced with today’s terrorism threats the ol’ days look pretty good in comparison. That is if we don’t take into account all the atrocities of past wars.

           Would it not be great if we could experience a world where man’s inhumanity to man would simply vanish?