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Jayne: Face it, ‘the good old days’ weren’t really all that good

By Greg Jayne, Columbian Opinion Page Editor
Published: July 12, 2015, 12:00am

In between the cat videos and the photos of what’s for lunch, Facebook occasionally provides some thought-provoking fodder.

Such was the case recently when a friend of mine shared a meme that said, “I miss the America I grew up in.” Considering this person’s typical posts, the implication was probably that President Obama is destroying the America of the past by virtue of being a secret racist foreign-born Muslim socialist. Or something like that; I might have read too much into it.

Anyway, seeing as how this is what passes for political discourse on social media, it made me think about the America in which I grew up. It made me think about how this nation has changed over the past 30 or 40 years. And it made me think, pensively and analytically, “Really?!? Are you nuts?!?”

You see, the America of my childhood — and yours — was riddled with problems. As much as we tend to sanitize the past, as much as we tend to lionize the nation that we viewed through innocent eyes, things weren’t all that great in the 1970s and the early 1980s. And not just because we had only five TV stations.

During my childhood, we had cars waiting in line for hours just to buy gas. We had National Guard troops gunning down student protesters. We had a seemingly endless war being fought for apparently specious reasons, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans. (OK, so some things haven’t changed.)

We had an annual inflation rate of 13 percent and interest rates of 20 percent. We had people smoking cigarettes in the workplace. We had one president resigning in disgrace and another administration selling arms to Iran in spite of an international embargo.

And if you think that America was a better place to live 40 years ago, just take a look at the environmental degradation demonstrated in the “Documerica” photo project of the early 1970s. Clean air and clean water, in my mind, are pretty important factors for a good quality of life, and we have made big improvements in these areas.

Health care? In 1975, according to the National Institutes of Health, 50 percent of cancer patients survived five years after diagnosis; now the number is 68 percent. Safety? In 1970, there were 4.74 traffic fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled; today, the number is less than one-quarter of that. Technology? You’re likely reading this on your computer or your phone; enough said. When I was a kid, the phone meant something that was attached to the wall and had a rotary dial.

But, wait, there’s more. Just consider the local landscape. Until the mid-1980s, downtown Vancouver was dominated by a brewery, and downtown Portland was dominated by full-block ground-level parking lots. In 1970, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times wrote about Portland’s “scattered bomb-site look of downtown parking lots.” Now these cities better incorporate and reflect the natural beauty of the region.

We’re better off

Yes, the fact is that this nation is a much better place than it was during my childhood, and the progress is even more pronounced when compared with the 1950s or 1960s. The 1950s brought us a war fought for specious reasons (sigh!), and the 1960s brought us cities aflame with racial strife.

All of that and we still haven’t touched upon increased equality and opportunities for women and minorities. The guess here is that few women lament the loss of the “Mad Men” workplace, few blacks miss Jim Crow laws, and few gays wish to return to the closet.

Which brings up the fallacy of longing for the America of your childhood. Sure, we have our problems now, but we had plenty back then, as well. Some of them have been dealt with effectively and some haven’t, and in 30 years plenty of people will wistfully long for this particular time in history.

That, too, would be a mistake. Because progress never means a return to the past; it can only be defined by reaching for the future.

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