Article 1 - "A CREED THROUGH THE AGES" February 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

    Does it seem like life today is worse than things used to be? Well, if you believe so, you haven't been the first one to think that way by a long shot. A cursory stroll through the book of Ecclesiastes will show that even back in the Bible days, people thought that the "old days" were better than the current ones. The Preacher admonishes: " Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?' For you do not inquire wisely concerning this" (Eccl. 7:10).

    There obviously is something about nostalgic reminiscing that is pervasive enough throughout the years that appears to be radically new thinking based on the "world today", and yet, it would seem this thinking has been around for awhile. There must be something going on that people think that society today, kids today, or whatever it is that is current is of lesser quality than it was when "they were young". Yet it seems they forget when "they were young", people were complaining about "kids today" just as much. It seems to have to do less with flower children and mooching adult children and something more to do with glorifying the past.

    I remember people born in the twenties through the early forties lamenting how life has changed since they were young, basically citing the angst between the World War II Generation and the Baby Boomers. I heard how the sixties spoiled everything that had been good before that, and now the world was falling apart. The ironic part is that now as an adult, I hear Boomers and even Gen Xers complain about how things have changed for the negative, and wasn't it quaint back in the good old sixties, seventies, and eighties?

    So what's going on here? Why do people assume that whenever they were younger, things were better than they are now? It's easy to find evidence to support this theory: just remember what was good yesterday and prop it up to the negative today, and suddenly, the past is so much greater better than the present. But this of course belies the obvious question: if whatever it is in the past that has changed was so universally regarded as the greatest thing on earth, why did it wind up going by the wayside? It seems to make sense that people like doing things that work. So if whatever it was worked so well, why would anyone change it to begin with?

    That's the problem with the so-called good old days: it's easy to remember only the good, and not remember the bad. It's like people who get divorced and, remembering only the good of the relationship, remarry each other and then exclaim, "Oh yeah! That's why we got a divorce!" The past can be so enshrined that it seems much better than what is going on now, which may be why people lament over the death of "the traditional nuclear family", when it was a post World War II invention that began to crumble only a couple of decades after its inception. Those who grew up in its womb only knew of its subsequent implosion; not all the generations of extended families that preceded the great fifties experiment all. So maybe it looked like the death of something sacred when the sixties came and smashed it to bits. But perfect it was not; else there probably wouldn't have been such an impact against it.

    What most likely happens is that the pain of the past is forgotten. One remembers the neighborhood ice cream truck rather than blacks being lynched or thinking their schoolroom desk would provide shelter in a "duck and cover" drill Or the angst of adolescence seems quaint next to fear of bills not paid and the anxiety that a pink slip could be handed to you next week at your job. But the fact that the feelings of the dark side of the past are somewhat faded doesn't mean that the dark side didn't exist, meaning that realistically, the past may not be any better than what one experiences in the moment.

    The difference may simply be that someone knows that they have lived through the past, while the present is fraught with possibilities. It as though the past is easier to deal with because it is gone, and can be manipulated to fit any image that a person wants. And perhaps, the idea of selective memory makes the past a better image, a dream that can be turned around on its head at a whim. Whereas the present doesn't allow for that much dreaming and can only be lived through, or evaded using various escape means like denial or alcoholism. Decisions made in the present may present consequences that are unpredictable. But the past seems like a lifeless form that can be arranged into a pretty picture like just so, like a piece of inert furniture that is just waiting for someone to give it a purpose and meaning.

    Perhaps this has something to do with the philosophy that the past was better than what is going on today, so embedded a psyche that it seems like a given fact rather than an attitude that has been pervasive since the days of the Preacher. Maybe it also has to do with the fear for one's children, that somehow the days today are worse than they used to be, and thus the future of subsequent generations seems to be threatened. Noticing the horrors of the present while remembering the ice-cream truck days of the past will probably always yield the idea somehow the past was better than today. Today's disasters, such as terrorism and global warming, have impact because they are still being lived through and don't have resolution like the Cold War did. But when the Cold War was at its height, those present times seemed just as dire, just as every other time had its own disasters. It is better to realize that the present is likely to hold as much hope for survival as the past did, and the past had its traumas that didn't seem surmountable either. Yet civilization survived, and if you were alive back then, so did you.

    Life continues, and it ends for everyone at some point. The past holds proof that one has survived, so it seems welcoming to an uncertain future. It's very true that at some point there will be some disaster that humanity won't survive, and even more certain that your personal life, or at least your current lifestyle, will end. But as it was from the days of Solomon, it is just the flow of life. And it also is proof that if yesterday was no better or worse than today, then tomorrow doesn't have to be any worse than what is going on now. Instead of consigning onself to a sentence that everything is going down the tube and there is nothing that one can do, if today isn't as bad as one imagines it to be, there is hope to create a better tomorrow.