Nostalgia: the dark side

 

But first, some music. Links for hearing what's posted are provided:

A love Ballad for Millennials (born after 2000)

STAY (excerpt)

The Kid LAROI, Justin Bieber

I do the same thing, I told you that I never would
I told you I changed, even when I knew I never could
I know that I can't find nobody else as good as you
I need you to stay, need you to stay, hey

I get drunk, wake up, I'm wasted still
I realize the time that I wasted here
I feel like you can't feel the way I feel
I'll be fucked up if you can't be right here

Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
I'll be fucked up if you can't be right here.

 

A love ballad for Baby Boomers (born in the 1950s)

I'll Never Find Another You (excerpt)

The Seekers

There's a new world somewhere
They call the promised land
And I'll be there someday
If you will hold my hand
I still need you there beside me
No matter what I do
For I know I'll never find another you

There is always someone
For each of us, they say
And you'll be my someone
Forever and a day
I could search the whole world over
Until my life is through
But I know I'll never find another you

Try on this explanation for the “culture war” as we are seeing it unfold in the USA:

Seeing the world in hindsight invariably results in a nostalgia reaction, the donning of rose-coloured glasses as we leaf through old photo albums. The nostalgia reaction exaggerates the good we remember as compared to the much-changed world we’re living in. This phenomenon is older than ravens (Hi, Doug!) and any historian will tell you that it has the power to paint mind pictures of WWII (for instance) that are heroic, glorious even. Nostalgia revises history.

Have you ever heard a senior say things like, “Kids these days have no respect,” or “Why is there no good music anymore?” These sentiments understandably magnify in proportion to the speed and extent of change and are subject to the rose-coloured-glasses nostalgia, the corollary being that kids were respectful once upon a time, and music was melodious and meaningful “when I was a kid.”

Again, the speed and extent of change exaggerates the dislocation of values in our minds. What characterizes our age (mine for instance, 1941 to today) is warp-speed change, ergo, our age is bound to experience unprecedented chaos, driven mostly by rage at the imagined loss of a world … that never really was. The disappointment at what appears to the large older-middle-aged group and seniors to be a burglary of an age made golden through nostalgia, easily turns to a collective rage and a search for the villains who are blindly ruining everything! It’s the right-wing “fascists” for some, the “woke” neo-Marxists for others; you might as well say “any crook will do in a storm.”

None of this is meant to say that the losses that come with change are all imaginary. The internet gave us texting, video conversation and email, but it also opened the door to a loss of privacy, scam opportunities and virulent trolling, plus being complex enough to leave all but a few of the oldest generation frustrated. I certainly feel nostalgic sometimes for the days of letters, postage stamps, wall phones and paper newspapers. I’m a proud curmudgeon.

It follows that the personality with a decidedly conservative bent will feel the burglary of the past the most. It might explain, for instance, why Republicans in the USA are as militantly angry as they are while Democrats are characterized as suffering from a lack of unity around a cohesive plan. Expectation of change that can’t be avoided should engender creativity in riding the changes in the best way possible; American Republicanism in its rage is focused firstly on preventing unliked change and, secondly, rolling public social policy back to an imagined earlier “golden” age.

The two “love songs” with which I opened this post were intended to illustrate the typical intergenerational frustration that’s at the heart of this thesis. I listen to music by my contemporaries: Neil Young, Paul Simon, the Carpenters, Carly Simon, Joan Baez, Don Maclean, Eric Clapton, etc. I shudder to imagine the clientele in a seniors’ housing project attending an Avril Lavigne concert, painfully enduring the Girlfriend song, perhaps.

A more salient illustration can be had by following court decisions on abortion, on gender dysphoria and the pronouns that have emerged as a result, even on the sanctity of keeping Mens’ and Women’s washrooms “as they’ve always been.” And we remember that a combination of factors have over more than a century made universal metrification of measurement in the USA impossible. Further, we’re well aware of the dynamics that led to a pro-choice ruling in Roe v. Wade, and what gigantic effort was put into turning the clock back on abortion.

We want to escape the hardship of change: global warming, national debt, social disruption, pandemics, artificial intelligence, population dislocation, etc. We want it to be like it was before the shifts became apparent. We want solutions without pain, without sacrifice, “like it used to be.” It’s natural. Trouble is, reality will assert itself despite mountains of wishful thinking, and it’s liberal (arguably), logical thinkers like Jesus Christ who will do what they can to point us toward our best future, but not without pain or sacrifice.

Seems to me that summarizing the “culture wars” by hating Donald Trump is both illogical and futile. Reaction—including rage—against change will happen and will seek out its justification and its heroes. If not Trump, then some other person who knows how to manipulate, magnify popular frustration into money and power will worm his/her/their way into the White House or other seat of authority.

Possibly you have a brother or sister who rails against the limiting measures being taken to slow climate change, while you’re frustrated by people who won’t “get with the program” like you’re trying desperately to do. Your sibling probably will attach politically to Poilievre or Bernier while you support the Liberals and/or New Democrats. Thanksgiving dinners at your house are probably  interesting.

You’ve no doubt noticed that arguing our half-facts, conspiracy theories and social media pronouncements isn’t getting us anywhere, so you may have decided to avoid the touchiest subjects.

A couple of things in conclusion: 1) Scientific assessment is nearly unanimous that global warming is broadly dangerous to humanity’s future, and 2) Your brother is objecting out of a very real psychological syndrome, a panic over changes he doesn’t understand fully, plus nostalgia for a time when climate change wasn’t talked about. And 3), it’s important that your sibling change his/her/their actions, if not their mind, at least if the future suffering and dying of people is important.

How that’s done is an even more urgent topic than this one.

  

 

Milton's Dress

 

Milton's dress

So here’s a brush with history and a reason to ponder the nature of the historic. In museum jargon, we call the story behind an artifact its provenance. On my desk at the Mennonite Heritage Museum in Rosthern lies a small child’s dress, once white, now somewhat yellowed. The provenance card reads: “BABY DRESS – worn by Milton Siemens in 1916. He drowned on his 21^st birthday. Accession #80-475.” (Small children wore dresses whether male or female in those days; it probably made diaper-care easier.)

       I guess I’ve always known the story of Milton Siemens; his brother and sister still attend my church. His tragic death was somewhat of a legend in my growing-up years and probably coloured my parents’ attitude toward youth excursions to water.

      The dress is very light—gauzy, almost. I held it in my hands for a while imagining Milton’s mother slipping it over his head on a Sunday morning in 1917 or so, preparing to go to church, possibly imagining the delighted chucks under the chin for her handsome little man. And I visualized the heartbreak 20 years later when she got the tragic news that her son had suddenly been torn from her.

     Provenance. I’m surrounded by stories.

      It’s possible that among the threads of this tiny garment, Milton Siemens’ DNA could still be found with modern technology—but I doubt it.

Also on my desk is a fine-china teacup. The manufacturer’s label is in Russian; the provenance note reads: “CUP from Russia – 1923. Helen Dyck family.” There are photographs on these premises of Mennonite migrants from Russia arriving in Rosthern in 1923. Somewhere in their luggage is this cup that was too delightful to be left behind. 

There’s a can of ground, roasted wheat on my desk as well; if I put a teaspoon of it in this cup and poured boiling water over it and drank it, how close could I come to the sensation of a mid morning pripz break in 1920 somewhere along the Dniepr River?

I’ve entered dozens of photographs into our new databases, faded black and whites of places in someone’s memory. This morning a friend showed me numerous photographs of his family history, especially of Osterwick, the village in Russian Ukraine through which his roots can be traced. Long overrun by progress, that place still must exist, some of the buildings erected by the Mennonites who once lived there must still be in use, I would guess. So is it still the same place?

For many people, places invoke both nostalgia and story like nothing else can. A year ago, my brother retired from the farm on which I grew up and the “Epp Place” finally went into the hands of strangers. A story ends—not without a few pangs of regret—and another begins. ‘Twas ever thus.

So, is it true as the philosophers say, “you can’t go home again?” Is there anything of us in the artifacts and places we leave behind? Is something lost if places and objects of the past are forgotten, their records abandoned?

Obviously, my view is that our lives are about more than just today or I wouldn’t be here in the Mennonite Heritage Museum on a stat holiday entering data for—and placing carefully into temporary storage—a small boy’s dress and a chipped Russian teacup.

Some would say there are landfills for that.

Born early enough

Branching out on the family tree

Can you find the nut in the family tree?

I was born early enough in the century (1941) to remember what it’s like to sit in the front seat of a buggy and watch the wheels twirling up dust in the tracks of a dirt road. If I close my eyes I can still smell horse, and the sensation of pulling a hair from the horse’s tail off my lips. Phew!

I was born early enough in the century to remember what a classroom smells like on the first of September when all the excruciating delight of July and August with no-Math-to-be-done had worn off and the newness of fresh things to read, sharpened pencils and notebooks still crisp waiting to be written-in, beckoning like sirens.   

I was born early enough in the century to have felt the joy of sunlight flickering through spinning poplar leaves, and to have heard the soft moan of a warm and wandering wind in the treetops. To have dreamt the future there under the boughs, a future that beckoned from east, west, north and south like barkers at an Exhibition.

And the dairy barn, the shuffling, munching sounds of Holsteins feeding in their stanchions, the impertinent braying of hungry calves and the snort and stamp of impatient horses in wood-floored stalls. The mixed smell of fresh horse, cow and calf manure, pungent in the frosty air billowing in from the door.

I was born early enough in the century to know the politics of family working the land together, tilling the summer fallow, taking turns cleaning seed grain in a dusty granary, feeling the chafe of oat dust under the collar and marvelling at the stream of grain from the auger at harvest time. Shovelling the heap in the bin, bent over under the roof rafters, the wheat dust piercing my nose like needles, shoulders screaming for a break.  

And evenings, yes. The work done, the reluctance to sleep, the urge to stretch the plum part of the day with a book, with a game of whist, with Wilf Carter on the radio. I marvelled how mother’s hands could keep the tatting shuttle flying back and forth so quickly, so persistently, and how father would snore at the radio, asleep, waiting for Earl Cameron to announce the world from pole to pole at 8:00 p.m. C.S.T. And the weather forecast, of course; will it finally rain?

Of such are the occasional thoughts of one born early enough in the century.