Lex Anteinternet: Romanticizing the Past: One of the things a lot of blogs like this one do is to romanticize the past. It's really common on some "looking back" blog...Strongly related to looking back on the past romantically, which almost everyone does to some extent, there's the "I wish I'd lived back in . . . " type of thinking. I'll confess, for people with a certain historical interest focused on a particular era, or perhaps conditions of a bygone era, that can be pretty tempting thinking. It's often, however, based on a highly romanticized view of the past or even a completely erroneous view of the past.
But sometimes the person stating that just doesn't know what the crud they're thinking.
Just the other day, I ran across an item on the Internet which said "I wish I'd been born 50 years ago as life was so much easier then".
Eh?
If you were born fifty years ago, you'd be fifty. You'd be living (assuming you didn't suffer early death of course) right now. So, if you lived fifty years ago as an infant, you wouldn't have been spared whatever you regard as uniquely difficult now.
On this, I was born 56 years ago. I may have an oddly unvarnished view of the years I've lived in, but its certainly the 60s, which I only dimly remember, were no national or international treat. The 70s weren't great either, with inflation eating everyone's savings at a prodigious rate.
The US was at war in a war that involved a much greater commitment of men and treasure than anything since from 1965, more or less, to 1973. We lost. Drugs were a major problem in all sorts of horrific ways. All the diseases that are killers now, in advanced societies, were around then except for some, like heart disease, the treatments were much more invasive and often deadly. AIDS made its appearance in the late 1970s.
Those who fail to learn history, as we know, may be condemned to repeat it. But not knowing any history condemns a person to real density.
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