What Good Is Nostalgia?
Josie N Wolhart
May 12 2008
** I am reading a lot about WWII and have always been into history and nostalgic myself about this time in our culture, and tonight I had a few ideas worth writing down. Hope they get you thinking. I know they did me.**

There's all this nostalgia for generations gone by these days. Call it collective subconscious or inherited memories, but somehow, we all seem to come by a longing for days of generations past as if we experienced them and missed them ourselves. We dress in "rockabilly" clothes or try to re-create art of eras gone by, we drive restored classic cars and dine in retro-chic restaurants, all to enhance the false sense of security all this looking back gives us.
It's funny, too, because mostly the era we long for these days is one that was torn apart by a war too terrible for words. The world's "Great War" had just come and gone and all the countries who had stood together to fight for freedom then thought they were doing just fine standing on their own feet now (by the 30s) and needed no help from anyone, thank you very much.
Along comes Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito and it's bye bye security, silk stockings, and silver linings, and hello war bonds, leg makeup, and thunderclouds with kamikazes flying out of them.
And still we look back on that time and want to recapture it. We naively think of it as a glamorous time, a time of nationalism, patriotism, a time of writing home to mother. It was all of those things, except maybe the glamorous part. It only looks glamorous to us, because we've degraded ourselves as a society so much today. Today in a war we stand divided. We blame politicians and policy makers and we ache for the days when the enemy was a big fierce monster with a name and a face who stood still for us to shove our blame and hatred onto. Instead we live in a world where enemies are shadowy and flitting. We can even go through a day convincing ourselves that the enemy, and the war, is a complete fabrication of our imaginations, or someone's.
And we look backward as we imagine ourselves safe, longing for "a simpler time". We forget that it too was a time of war. A time when mothers and daughters and girlfriends and wives and younger brothers and fathers would gather around the table reading letters and writing them to their beloved sons at war. When daughters and wives who had never had to work got jobs in order to keep the war effort going at home. When young kids even joined in with the effort, gathering recyclables and doing what jobs they could. When the war department cranked out propoganda we think ourselves too savvy and jaded to listen to were ot to exist today. But it certainly kept a generation of soldiers and their families united together and working hard. It certainly still today sparks patriotism and an aching need to figure out how to turn this shaky handbasket around and make it back there to the days when one loved first God, then Mother, and then Country.
I yearn for some good propoganda myself today. I think our world could use a good dose of hearing about how our good old boys overseas are going to bring this war to a close and soon. How they're fighting hard to ensure the values and freedoms we founded this country on. Propoganda that isn't untrue, but which we somehow have convinced ourselves is unfitting as we grew older and more jaded as a country. Now I use the word propoganda because I know that is what it was, what it would be, but it's not always a bad thing or an untruthful thing. Anyway, it's a very useful thing.
Far more useful, I think, would be that old time style of propoganda than the type we are inundated with today. These days it seems the only press that exists is the kind meant to constantly slap one in the face with a cold bucketful of "hard reality".
We all know the hard realities. WE GET IT! There's destruction by fire and tornado down south, the damned terrorists are still out there blowing things up, serial killers are still killing, baseball teams are still losing, people we trust are still molesting, and the President isn't infallible either. The pope's ancient, the president might be a wooden puppet, the government is run by trained squirrels only no one can figure out who trained them, and the rest of the world hates us because we have all the lollipops and we won't share! But is that what we as a country should always have to be focusing on? No wonder we're becoming a hardened and emotionally crippled people.
I'd love to see posters in every public arena, every office building and street, that reminded me of how hard those boys over there are working, of all the good and solid things I might do to help too. I need a healthy dose of that in my life. A good bit of telling me to save my money, that the war would go better if we waste pennies on weekly manicures and tanning and breast implants, and telling me also that what I'm doing here matters, that what we do helps those who have gone off to possibly die for us: well, that seems like something I could get down with right about now. Something we all might really need, in fact. There are men and women out trying to make the world safe for the babies we're creating, for the world we're taking for granted, and they are losing their lives for it. We too easily forget what they're working for, and what they are sacrificing. We complain and we whine about the economy and the "hard times" because we think they should be over there giving up limbs, lives, and sanity for our freedoms... but that we shouldn't even be hit in the pocketbook? There's no draft, and no you didn't sign up, but it's still your country damnit. And if you aren't going to help support it, get the hell out. As for the war we're fighting today being different, well, you're right about that.
The type of war we fight today is different. The reality-mongers on the news are right about that, too. Wars today aren't good for the economy. They don't inspire national pride or unity. They seem to only bring about more complaining and confusion and abject un-warranted hatred from us here at home.
But whose fault is that?
I'd have to say it is ours and ours alone. We as a people have allowed ourselves to move farther and farther from the values we once held as a culture. Freedom went to our puny little heads. This country has truly reached its adolescence, I'd say, in all it's whining, slamming the door, running away from home, pouting Teenage glory.
And yet we remain, for the most part, smart enough to look back on this noble generation that came before and know, if even just instincively, that we are missing something. We try to emulate them but so far all we've done is put on the clothes. We're still walking around in hand-me-downs if we're trying to emulate the last great generation our country had, shuffling around in too big shoes and wondering why we keep tripping on our own feet. What we need is a good old fashioned propoganda campaign telling us to stop being weaselly ass hats and start learning to actually be like the generation we keep emulating with a trend once a decade. Sure, swing dance on the weekend like it's 1995, wear a zoot suit to the prom, but then get up, grow up and realize there's a true reason we always look to that generation.
We look back on that time as if the people living then didn't know what we know. I've got news for my generation: We have nothing new to say. There isn't a one of us who will come up with something that hasn't been done before in one way or another. Improvements might be made, we may reinvent the wheel... but it's still a wheel. It still turns in the same function.
And so it is with generations. We think "Oh, it was a more innocent time." Maybe more hopeful. Maybe more optomistic. More innocent? I think not. Who has had to do LESS to get themselves through life than this current generation? We are given everything and we complain about it all while it's being handed to us.
And then we look back and we wonder what it is we can't quite grasp about a generation who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They fought their way out of the depression, through another hideous bloody war, and they stood by each other the whole time. They congratulated their servicemen when they returned home, for a job well done serving the country that sent them away. They didn't get in bar brawls with them and attempt to shame them for doing a job most of us are too cowardly to sign up for.
They sent letters filled with all their hopes and dreams and prayers, so many heartfelt prayers, to a generation of boys who were just doing what they knew was right for future generations.
Most of all, I think what our generation is missing is that "service to others" mentality. Men at war are not often fighting it for themselves. They are fighting it because they know that there are generations to come and they should be given a world worth living in. Those at home during WWII were sacrificing for the same reasons. They realized they were still building this nation, still making it great, still trying to leave it better for their children and grandchildren.
More than that, they were bettering it for us. They were ready to give up all they had at home, every comfort of daily life, in order to ensure victory in the war. Even before the war, they were working harder than we have ever had to work in ourlives. 12 and 14 hour workdays, six day workweeks... These things were not uncommon at the time. Not to mention how much more manual labor nearly every job in existence took than any take now. And still, they sacrificed all the small comforts they did have, because it was right and true and for their Country and those who would live in it after them.
Meanwhile, today, here we sit on our oversized rumps thinking this country has been built. We treat it like a building that is finished, storm proofed, and somehow impenetrable. We think we need do no re-inforcing, no insuring for the future, no further accomodation for anyone or anything.
I have the distinct feeling that while we sit here thinking this country is built and finished, it's slowly crumbling from foundation and steeple alike.
And we can not even hear the pieces fall.
Nowadays we wave nonchalantly goodbye to the boys gone off to war and head out to WalMart to buy a new lip gloss and a 7500 inch television set no one needs so we can later complain about the debt we're in, and the troubled economy and the shitty government we hired who isn't holding our hand and hauling us up out of the pit.
The thing America seems to be forgetting about a government made for the people, is that it is also a government run and supported BY the people. We're it. If you've got a problem with the world today, the war today, or welfare in the US today, look no further than yourself. The glory of a country where we are our own bosses, is that we have no one else to blame.