Sometimes I think about all this “back to the good old days” rhetoric and I’m like, “sure, let’s go back to the 50s or whatever when we all inhaled lead fumes and other chemicals, suffered through diseases like polio and the measles, and oh yeah, lived under the constant shadow of total nuclear annihilation. That sure sounds like “the good old days,” and something everyone would want to go back to.
But then I thought, maybe it’s not about “the good old days,” but rather some sort of self-destructive urge to go back to when things were objectively not better… maybe that is the whole point. Maybe the generation that grew up under the specter of nuclear Armageddon for so long is now somehow disappointed that the promised annihilation never came? And now they’re set on making it happen themselves?
Maybe these people are longing not for a past that was, but for a past that never happened?
@Keith very good! It sometimes truly looks as if some of them are disappointed apocalypsists. I had assumed a better future as someone that grew up hearing "the ozone layer hole is going to kill us" and seeing it solved, still in time to see the last French nuclear tests in the news and consequent bans, and even remember about two Germanies and the Berlin wall falling when I was just barely a kid.Seeing some of the opinions that are coming back today is certainly not any "good old days".