The Way We Never Were

How nostalgia and perception clouds our understanding of who we are and how we came to be.


Lately I’ve had the occasion to reflect at great length on what I see in our society as a growing fondness for the way things used to be. It’s called nostalgia, and while it is not a new phenomenon, it has grown into a national obsession over the last few months.

Simply stated nostalgia is defined as a longing for the past, a sort of homesickness if you will that borders on romanticism. Those who suffer from its effects often have feelings of melancholy about change and often react morbidly when confronted with the fact that no matter how hard they try, they cannot return to the past. And even when they reflect fondly back upon it, their recollection of how things were is skewed by a distorted perception.

I have been a victim of nostalgia myself and quite recently. Earlier this month, for instance, my wife and I went on vacation to San Francisco for the occasion of our fifteenth wedding anniversary. We had gone there for our honeymoon and thought it would be nice to “relive” the experience. The city did not disappoint; it was magnificent, just as it was back in 1994. North Beach, China Town, Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park, the Muir Woods, Berkeley, the cable cars, and both the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges. It was breath taking. To say I was sad to leave would be an understatement. As it began to dawn on me Friday that we would be leaving the next day, I couldn’t help but wonder where the time had gone; and, as we sat on the grass of Washington Square Park, I was hoping that this moment my wife and I were experiencing would last forever. It was as though I wanted time to stop moving forward, just so we could always stay right where we were in our vacation. But time doesn’t stand still; it keeps on moving forward no matter how hard we resist. The problem with the present is that it all too quickly becomes the past, and all you are left with are memories. Like it or not, my wife and I boarded the plane for home the next day. Exit vacation stage left; enter reality.

Looking around the political landscape of the country these days, I see an awful lot of people who have been caught up in a nostalgic haze. For them it isn’t so much a longing for a longer lasting vacation, but rather for a return to a time when things were simpler and less chaotic. People left their doors unlocked, children walked to school without supervision, people stood on their own two feet, father knew best, and everyone left it to Beaver.

Compare and contrast those times with today and it is easy to understand how some might be caught up in an over zealous melancholy. Home invasion, children being abducted, welfare fraud, South Park and Family Guy. Yes, I suppose if those two extremes were presented to me, I might tend to agree that today’s world is no match for yesterday’s. The good old days are pretty tough to beat aren’t they?

Gladys Knight once said, “Come to think about it, as bad as we think they are these will become the good old days for our children.” Those words were the opening lines in a remake of the classic Barbra Streisand song “The Way We Were.” Knight sang that song in 1975, more than thirty years ago. Those children are now fully grown, many of them with children of their own. I was one of those children that grew up in the ‘70s, and while I have no children of my own, I have often thought about that time in my life. Was it really that much better? Or did it just feel that way? Knight goes on in the prologue of the song, “Why does it always seem that the past is better? We look back and we think the winters were warmer, the grass was greener, the skies were bluer, and smiles were brighter.” And then she begins to sing the first verse of the song:

Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time rewritten every line?
And if we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me
Would we?
Could we?

Deep down we know what the real answers are. The problem, however, is that reality is not what we’re looking for. It never is. Like me on that vacation last week, I wanted no part of reality. All I wanted was for my good time to keep going on. Returning home and going back to work was not something I was looking forward to, no matter how essential it was. My perception was not based on facts but fantasy. The fantasy was that we could stay in San Francisco forever on vacation without a care in the world; the facts were that we could never have afforded to stay there indefinitely and we both needed to return to work in order to pay for the vacation we had just enjoyed. To the rational mind, facts, no matter how inconvenient or unpopular, eventually win out over fantasy.

But since perception, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, it can often become twisted and distorted over the years. We conveniently forget the bad times we lived through, and choose only to remember the good ones. When thinking about history we forget about the McCarthyism and segregation of the ‘50s, the Vietnam War and the riots of the ‘60s, or the political scandals and runaway inflation of the ‘70s. No matter how many episodes we watch of Ozzie and Harriet, Gunsmoke or the Carol Burnett Show, nothing but our selective amnesia can hide the painful truth that most of what we believe and know of the past has been influenced not by real events, but by our distorted perceptions of them.

That the good old days weren’t that much better than the present is a truth we simply don’t want to hear, because it means facing up the realities of a complex, and sometimes upside down world. We may have wanted the world in which Robert Young and Jane Wyatt had it all together, everybody got along, and hardship never darkened their door, but deep down we were smart enough to know that life more closely resembled the world in which Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton headed up a dysfunctional family that argued constantly and was mired in the controversies of the day. The two worlds of Father Knows Best and All in the Family were about as stark a dichotomy as any imaginable. The former represents our fantasy; the latter our reality. They were separated by two decades, yet they may as well have been in different galaxies as far as anyone could tell. Fantasy often seems real until you wake up in the morning and find the light of the new day shining brightly upon your face.

Take good old-fashioned self-reliance for example. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, wrote that “most Americans agree that prior to federal ‘interference’ in the 1930s, the self-reliant family was the standard social unit of our society. Dependencies used to be cared for within the ‘natural family economy,’ and even today the healthiest families ‘stand on their own two feet.’ The fact is, however, that depending on support beyond the family has been the rule rather than the exception in American history, despite recurring myths about individual achievement and family enterprise. It is true that public aid has become less local and more impersonal over the past two centuries … but Americans have been dependent on collective institutions beyond the family, including government, from the very beginning.”

Coontz goes on to expose yet another myth about self-reliance, this time with respect to the American West. “Prairie farmers and other pioneer families owed their existence to massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations that dispossessed hundreds of Native American societies and confiscated half of Mexico, and state-sponsored economic investment in the new lands. Even ‘volunteers’ expected federal pay: Much of the West’s historic ‘antigovernment’ sentiment originated in discontent when settlers did not get such pay or were refused government aid for unauthorized raids on Native American territory. It would be hard to find a Western family today or at any time in the past whose land rights, transportation options, economic existence, and even access to water were not dependent on federal funds.”

Between the $15 million it spent on the Louisiana Purchase and the $200 million it spent on building canals that linked the eastern seaboard with the new settlements in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, government intervention and funding were critical in the development of United States hegemony in the hemisphere. The rugged, go-it-alone approach, so widely held to by many of today’s conservatives, was nothing more than a myth started by individuals who felt slighted by the government and passed on by one generation to the next in perpetuity.

And it wasn’t just the establishment of an American empire that required a massive government undertaking. By the early twentieth century most of the wealth of the nation was held in the hands of a very few powerful men like J.P. Morgan, who owned U.S. Steel, the International Mercantile Marine and controlling interests in several banks as well as most of the railroads in the country. At one point Morgan and his partners controlled aggregate resources of more than $22 billion, equal to the value of all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River. In December 1912, Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. The committee ultimately found that a cabal of financial leaders were abusing their public trust to consolidate control over many industries. The findings of the committee inspired public support for ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, passage of the Federal Reserve Act that same year, and passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. Government intervention, far from being intrusive, was essential in the break up of the Trusts and in restoring the level playing field needed for a truly competitive market.

The establishment of National Parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite was yet another example of reality triumphing over myth; the myth being that government encroachment into the private sector is always disastrous. Without the protection of the federal government most of the parks that had been set aside would’ve been the victim of private development interests, their beauty lost to future generations forever.

Noted conservative and sometimes hypochondriac, Pat Buchanan, has been lamenting for some time now the loss of traditional American values and sounding the warning bells over the grave threat posed by illegal immigration.

“The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.”

Buchanan fails to see that every ethnic minority that immigrated to these shores brought with them experiences and values that were unique to this country and could not help but shape its culture. His myopia is no different than that of his predecessors who feared the Italians, the Germans, the Jews, the Irish, or the Poles. Irrational fear makes us see things that aren't really there and blinds us to the truth.

But of all the myths that have been perpetrated on the country, none have been more hideous than the idea of black poverty being tied inexorably to the disintegration of the black family. Stephanie Coontz again writes “The image of black family collapse feeds on racist stereotypes and media distortions, ignoring the diversity of African-American family life. Yet it also draws on some real, and very disturbing, trends affecting a section of black America. The most striking of these is a social and economic polarization in which poor African Americans have lost ground, both relatively and absolutely, for the past twenty years.

“Journalist Ken Auletta’s The Underclass (1982) first popularized the concept that black poverty is linked to a degraded inner-city subculture locked into self-defeating personal and familial behaviors. The argument became increasingly stark over the 1980s: Black poverty exists because black men are irresponsible, black women are immoral, and black children run wild. What African Americans need, according to what is often called ‘the new consensus,’ is not government programs but a good dose of sexual restraint, marital commitment, and parental discipline.

“No other minority got so few payoffs for sending its children to school, and no other immigrants ran into such a low job ceiling that college graduates had to become Pullman porters. No other minority was saddled with such unfavorable demographics during early migration, inherited such a deteriorating stock of housing, or was so completely excluded from industrial work during the main heyday of its expansion. And no other minority experienced the extreme ‘hypersegregation’ faced by blacks until the present. All these circumstances greatly affected African-American family life.”

Another hideous myth that is accepted as fact is “the so-called explosion of childbearing among single black women. Birth rates for black women have actually fallen by 13 percent since 1970, compared to an increase of 27 percent among unmarried white women.” Much of what we know of the African American experience in this country is based on false perceptions fed to us by a largely white media, which knows “next to nothing” about the true facts of black poverty.

In an excellent example of perception over reality consider that one of the more realistic television shows depicting a black family – at least for the first three seasons – was Good Times. It featured a conventional nuclear black family with a strong black man as the head of the household who often worked two jobs just to put food on the table and a mother who nurtured her three children and raised them to be respectful. Though poor and living barely above the poverty line, they nonetheless got by and remained intact. In every way imaginable, the show bucked the perception of racial stereotypes for black families, and by all rights should have been a hit. And yet its ratings, with the exception of season two, remained poor throughout its tenure on CBS.

By contrast, a decade later NBC launched The Cosby Show, depicting an upper middle-class black family featuring Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable and his wife, a practicing attorney, who, despite an obviously demanding schedule, manage to successfully raise their family. The show was a hit for the entire length of its run, tracking number one five seasons in a row. Many have concluded that the popularity of The Cosby Show when compared with the small appeal of Good Times was due to the fact that a larger percentage of Americans found it far more plausible to believe in a financially affluent black family that stays together than a struggling one that doesn’t fall apart. In other words, John Amos’ character of James Evans was unbelievable as a father who chose not to run out of his responsibility as a father, whereas Bill Cosby’s character of Dr. Huxtable fit right in with viewers’ expectations about a successful black father. Ironically, the producers of Good Times, in a contract dispute with Amos, decided to write him out of the series after the third season by having him die in a car accident.

So you see myths, while they have played a crucial role in our development, have also taken on a life of their own and, when carefully explored, do not hold up to the light of day. That they are still kept alive is proof that reality, despite being essential for our survival, is still way too inconvenient and sometimes just too painful to bare. But when we have the courage to wake up from our denial and embrace reality, far from consuming us, the freedom it provides, allows us to grow into the people God intended us to be.

No matter how much I may have resisted returning home from my wonderful vacation, when I woke up the next morning I was in my own bed in Long Island, New York. My melancholy would last a few days until I finally accepted my reality. I still have my nostalgic moments when I retreat into the past. Like the population, my old habits die hard. The "City By the Bay" still beckons, and no doubt Maria and I will return to it again one day. For now it remains where it has always been and must stay: 3,000 miles to the west.