This BBC article got me thinking, do old people really want things to be like they were in the ’50s?
Most of us (reading this blog) weren’t alive in the ’50s. Furthermore, many of us don’t spend much time chatting with people who were alive in the ’50s (other than our grandparents) so it’s hard to get any perspective on our parts.
Fortunately you have me 
. Being in ministry I’ve had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time with lots of people who are at least two generations behind me. I’ve eaten countless meals with them. I’ve spent days and sometimes even weeks on end with them, living and working with them. I’ve picked their brains, listened to their war-time stories and their great-depression stories too. These old folks have lots of stories.
So when I read an article such as the one the BBC published (linked above) I think to myself, “That’s a stupid article.” Why you ask? Because from my experience when an old person says, “I want things to be the way they were back in the ’50s” they actually have a set of very specific things they’re referring to; and none of them involve yellow smog.
People of that generation really don’t want the cold-war back, or the food lines, or McCarthyism (you pinko) or racism. When they say they want things back the way they were they’re basically saying “I want to take the good things from the ’50s then cut and paste them into this day and age.”
They’re talking about the fact that back then they didn’t need laws to keep people from making fools of themselves. That was a job that private citizens took care of by — God forbid — actually confronting someone whose pants were about to fall off and tell them, “You look like a moron, get a belt.”
I write this article because I get a growing feeling that my generation really thinks the previous generations have gone retarded. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a matter of viewing life and the world differently. And when an old person says they miss the way things used to be keep in mind they’re talking about certain specific things that they miss, not literally everything.
