Nostalgia has always been with us.

You just know that when we were still on the savannah and Gog lit the first fire, some guy in the back of the cave muttered, “Things were better before we had cooked meat and warmth.”

I bring this up because my dad sent me nostalgia spam yesterday. It was a right-wing propaganda spam saying how those of us born in 40s, 50, 60s, and 70s were so lucky because things “back then” when things were “so much better.”

Apparently, our mothers were all cigarette-smoking- martini-swilling-fun-loving gals. Our cribs were painted in lead based paints and we ate white bread, sugared soft drinks, and American cheese with impunity. (I think the point of this missive is how hearty we all are to have survived this perilous time.) Then it talks about how we played outside all day long and farted sunshine and roses.

What galls me about this asinine crap is that it’s so patently bone-headed. In the forties we were fighting a World War and coming out of The Depression. In the fifties we destroyed people’s lives because we thought they might be Commies. And let’s not forget our little sojourn into Korea. In the sixties we had Vietnam. In the seventies we had inflation, the oil crisis, and polyester. Not to mention that polio and smallpox were still threats to people’s health. As were the usual plethora of diseases. (We didn’t have antibiotic resistant bacteria yet, so that was better.)

Blacks didn’t have equality, neither did women. (And in 1940, women had had the right to vote for all of twenty years. Think about that. Women in this country have been able to vote for less than one-hundred years. And we still don’t have equal rights.)

In short, it wasn’t the halcyon nirvana that the author of this spam believes it was.

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