Nostalgia

       For Christmas this year I got my dad a new book by Stephen King, 11/26/23, about a time traveler's attempt to stop the assassination of JFK (and named after the on date which it occurred). After he finished it, he recommended I read it. I started it, and found it was actually pretty good. The book is partly historical fiction, and it touches on a lot of ideas we have been talking about when we discuss the social conditions of life in the 60's. One particular passage struck me as being extremely relevant, both to what we have been discussing recently in class and to a theme I had thought about myself in the past. The author is talking about the restrooms at a gas station in North Carolina:

"The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts.... If I ever gave you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? the one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream."

I noticed this passage specifically because earlier in the book, I did notice how positive King was about almost everything in the past, how he seemed to portray the 1960's as some sort of utopia when  people were friendlier, there was no such thing as airport security, and everything was basically perfect. The very first thing the main character does when he comes to the past is buy a root beer float, which he described as one of the greatest things his 21st century taste buds had ever tasted. It had started to bug me. Nostalgia is part of being human, and people always yearn for the past, but it seems to me that nostalgia often leads to the belief that everything was better in the past; that back in the day, things worked the way they should. Sentiments like that have always bugged me. They simplify events, and rely on cliches as proof. As King points out, there were serious problems with society in which significant progress has been since "The good old days". Root beer floats may have tasted better, but is that important if a chunk of the population can't buy that float from the same counter as the rest? It's my personal belief that, despite worries about climate change, societal decline, swine flu, or anything else, the world is steadily becoming a better place.