I guess I’m feeling a little bit nostalgic for a time in the past when it felt gentler, and kinder. Nostalgia is probably by definition, not an objective reality. It’s a sentimental yearning for what once was, even if it wasn’t.
The downside of being aware of sociopolitical stress and the over-information shoved in our faces in today’s culture, is it makes life a tad harder and sadder. An internet meme circulated around 2019 is a reaction to such awareness, “I wish I lacked critical thinking skills. You all seem so happy.”
When we think about “back in the day,” we don’t really make up the past, but we embellish it with only the good parts. I’m sure there were bullies when I was growing up. In fact I heard musings that a classmate who refused to come to any of our reunions said, “why would he want to be around the people who made his life miserable in school.”
Even though the movie, Mean Girls wasn’t in theaters until 2004, there were mean girls way back when. Lord God, I hope I wasn’t one of them. I regretfully recall a couple of instances as a teenager, when I was insensitive, less than kind, gossipy, and a smart aleck. But hopefully I was not full-out mean. “I’m sorry,” she cried repentantly to the people in the universe she floated in back then.
When I was coming of age in the seventies in rural America, society wasn’t so harsh. Today, as long as you speak “your truth,” you can present your opinion in the most severe terms. As long as it’s true, it would appear that you can be as mean and ignorant as you wanna be to anybody and everybody.
If you think the hippy-dippy’s of the sixties and seventies lacked respect for authority, oh baby, take a listen to today’s youth. Critical thinking and solid reasoning aren’t exactly qualities of teenagers or young adults. Their brains just aren’t there yet. But they are mouthy.
Teenagers and young adults are the very same folks who are encouraged by Internet culture to spread their opinions far, wide, and loud. The beginning of a teenage social activism movement of sorts began perhaps with Greta Thunberg. Back in 2019 this fifteen year old girl from Sweden made a huge splash as an environmental activist, celebrated as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
Activism, influencing, and internet notoriety have become career goals for many a young person. Have you met many people under thirty who don’t think they know everything about everything? Asserting such independence starts, I think, around two years old.
“The original celebrity social media influencer,” Perez Hilton, started his blog featuring gossip and vitriol about celebrities when he was twenty-five years old back in 2004. Just this week he tragically attempted to take his life via a live-stream on TikTok, while some virtual onlookers egged him on and others called 911. He is currently under physical and psychiatric evaluation in a Miami hospital.
It’s such a contradiction for our society to promote using the more polite euphemism, “sleeping with someone” instead of “having sex with someone,” and then hear a “child” singing a Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion lyric. Do you remember a time when we were told to “watch your mouth” when using a substitute swear-word?
Does anybody watch their mouth today? The “F-word” is common vernacular in the mouths of people, everywhere.
Back in the day it was novel and enlightening to talk freely about sex. Today, sex talk has completely lost its mystique and doesn’t even resemble intimacy. Hardcore hip-hop/rap culture has taken over the subject and it’s raw, to say the least.
One of the best arguments calling for a return to a gentler time was provided by comedian, Tom Cotter who has compared some radio bans of the 1940s flirtatious Christmas tune, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” with the explicit chart-topping rap song “WAP.” Check him out on the Internet if you want to hear this stark reality for yourself. By the way, you don’t even want me to tell you what WAP stands for.
Cotter’s comparison highlights how utterly “out of its mind” our collective culture has become. It seems that cancel-culture suggests that we boycott a hint of nostalgic naughtiness, and celebrate unfiltered filth.
It was most probably a gentler time prior to the 1970s. Commencing in the 1970s, mainstream journalism became ruder, tactless, sensational, and more adversarial. Then, beginning with the advent of the World Wide Web let’s say around 1990, widespread anonymity lent power to everybody with an opinion.
But, today in the twenty-first century people don’t even bother trying to hide behind the anonymity of the World Wide Web and they openly promote themselves by ramping up their rudeness, sensationalism and adversarial behavior. Too, the assault is worse today because it’s not just in writing, it blares to us in full fledged stereophonic audio and video.
Sometimes, don’t you just want it to stop? I can hear some of you saying, “just don’t listen to it.” In an ideal world, that’s wise advice. However, when it’s important for your own business interests to stay up on current events and know what’s happening out there, you have to sift through a whole lot of nonsense, to benefit from what’s helpful to know.
Will you please be gentle with me. I’m begging you.