Applied Nostalgia Essay, Research Paper
Applied Nostalgia–A Parental Look Back
Without past memories, Americans lack a standard to base present conditions
upon. These memories lie carefully shuffled and categorized in the giant shifter called the
brain to crudely approximate the present standard of life. They hope to draw gratification
and fulfillment in the progression of the quality of their and especially their children’s lives.
This innate desire to compare the past to the present drives personal and political
decisions, especially conservatives who advocate a change to the policies and values of the
past.
Today, the faded memories of an emerging group of parents of their post-World
War II upbringing, like cherished family dinners around the kitchen oak table and careless
excursions into town, against a perceived modern backdrop haze of random violence, date
rape, and single parent households, turned a group of parent’s hearts and minds to the
bygone 1950s. They hope to revive their cherished childhood memories. The Medveds,
parental authors, recall their upbringing: “The women enjoyed being home for the kids”
and “peers came over for basketball and homemade lemonade” (Paul 64). Shalit, author of
Return to Modesty: A Lost Virtue remembers when past women helped around the
community and raised their children with a unparalleled dedication (Paul 64). In the wake
of the Colorado school massacre such a move seems justified. Yet, even in spite of many
social ills of our “drug-addicted, sex-obsessed, morally lax and spiritually bankrupt
society” (Paul 64) parents remain skeptical. of such a drastic reversal in a drastically
changed time. For now, the skepticism over the reversal to the past merits further
examination before any drastic action.
The parents advocating a change to the past promote a bleak present and future
with problems ranging across the social, political, and economic spectrum, afraid that their
worries might mirror in their kids. Adult fairy tales that “marriage will last forever, sex
produces only pleasure, loyalty to an institution will be returned, and elected leaders are
benevolent and wise”(Paul 63) are to unbearable to be placed on the weak shoulders of
their children. Thus, they shield this information from the children.
Armed with reams of statistics, especially in the drop the number of nuclear family
homes in the United States (Two 1), they present a fair case for the reversal to the
parenting style of the aging baby boomer population. An incomplete list of their claimed
ills includes single parent households, an overly demanding work environment, influx of
undesirable media, and the feminist movement.
Fatherlessness, as David Blackhord president of Institute for American values
points out, is the most harmful demographic trend of our generation…and the leading
cause of declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most
urgent social problems, from crime, to adolescent pregnancy, to sexual abuse, to domestic
violence against women. The evidence is now strong that the absence of fathers from the
lives of children is one of the most important causes [of the above problems] (UCSF 1)
In one augmenting study performed by the University of California at San
Francisco on California’s family makeup reported that twenty percent of children under
age eighteen are currently raised by a single adult.
Accusative fingers of these nostalgic parents turn like an vengeful hinged gate from
family structure to the work environment, citing statistics on the economic difficulties that
modern employers cause, or on personal obsessions with work that deters from the
infinitely more important job at home. “With parents trapped in consuming jobs, they leave
their kids to fend for themselves” (West 2).
The type of work and work environment changed in the last few decades with the
advent of new technologies and pressure on employers to cut costs. According to the
parents and researchers who advocate a reversal to the past, the modern work
environment is besieged with problems.
Reductions in real wages, corporate downsizing and the cessation of the ‘company
man’ ethos that governed American labor relations during the 1950s and 1960s has made
it impossible for parents to devote necessary time to their children because they have to
work harder than every just to make ends meet (West 1).
The goals of financial success have placed the goals of raising a kid to the back
burner. These impersonal parents scrape up the few extra dollars to buy the hearts of their
children (McCallum 2). “In our materialistic society, parents are more concerned about the
physical things they provide their children that about the values and habits that prepare
children for a life on their own” (McCallum 2).
The nineties have been defined as the information age and rightfully so. Any
individual who accesses today’s wide variety of electronic medium–computer, Internet,
television, radio, compact disks, CD-ROMs, and interconnected libraries–finds ample
information on any subject, regardless of content. The nostalgic argue that when these
kids contact this huge barrage of ‘objectionable’ material without guidance from parents,
the material acts as a surrogate mother, advising the children with undesirable choices.
Such choices include rash violence. TV permeates every nationwide household, and its
flickering light is the de facto babysitter for overworked and underpaid parents, who often
have to support the family without the spouse present.
Their version of a modern parent falls victim to the media’s hidden messages. The
media portrays dads in deadbeat ways that do not reflect on actual parents. In movies like
the Shining, the father was an abusive alcoholic and rap music epitomizes poor examples
of deadbeat dads and their crack addicted single mothers. As a result mothers are more
likely to ditch their boyfriend of husband for single parenthood convinced they will raise
the child in a better environment without the father. In conclusion, “what you have is an
all-out war on parents, the result of which is ultimately the decline of civic virtue and the
overall welfare of the nation” (Schaffer 2).
Tagging along with the nostalgia movement is a new women’s movement that tries to
reverse the effects of the first (Paul 64). Shalit, in her book Returning to Modesty:
Discovering the Lost Virtue, points out that the social progressions has left women is
poorer condition than before the movement started (Paul 64).
Our mothers tell us we shouldn’t want to give up all the hard-won ‘gains’ they
nave bequeathed us, and we think: what gains? Sexual harassment, date rape, slaking,
eating disorders, all those dreary hook-ups? Or perhaps it’s the great gain of divorce you
had in mind. (Paul 64)
The ramifications, at least to these overseeing parents, of living in the current
structured parenting environment of the United States is vast and include an increase in
the rate of crime, teenage pregnancies, drugs, rape, divorce, poor relationships, and abuse.
Those with a “proper” upbringing, a hopelessly undefinable and impossibly utopian word,
commit less violent acts.
The pivoting ramification, and a central pivot for both this paper and the emerging
nostalgia movement is the possible loss of “innocence”. Innocence to proponents equals
the lack of harming children (opponents deny the occurrence) by cutting children’s
exposure to all adult material. The word adult is not used in the traditional pornographic
sense, but as a general category defining all information that the average child should not
know. This includes such topics as sex, marriage, work, and violence.
Now, as information rapidly increases, the rush to protect kids from this incoming
blow increases. Today innocence, the isolated and lighted room in a mansion of despair,
could be defined as an escape from the informational age. Open the door, and the light
(innocence) escapes, forever departed. Knowledge is potent stuff; that’s why we keep it
away from small children. And its shy we must keep some of it for ourselves. In careless
of unscrupulous hands, knowledge is dangerous and the innocent are powerless to oppose
it (Paul 65).
A few adults are even becoming sick of the amount of information: “Our time’s
tree of knowledge is so heavy with apples that we’ve grown sick of tasting them” (Paul
65). The Medveds, authors of Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children From the
Natural Assault on Innocence, say “the secrets of adulthood are harsh, morbid, oppressive,
and seamy,” bringing nothing but “obligations, troubles, burdens and the potential for
depression and gloom” (Paul 64) and Shalit says the loss of innocence causes most young
women’s problems including eating disorders and unsatisfying relationships. Jeffery
Schwartz sums up the argument: innocence is “the highest of human accomplishments”
and “the defining mark of those who have achieved genuine victory in facing life’s
innumerable challenges” (Paul 64). Many of the underlying problems remain constant
throughout the decade, including ensuring that the family had a reasonable standard of
living, taking care of their children’s growth and development, and maintaining their
commitment to the spouses they swore to remain with until after death, (West 1) yet the
average American family today cannot meet these new burden. The result? Just pick a
problem and fill in the blank.
An aggregate of these aforementioned problems may be justly deserved, but
without a comparison to the past then the present conditions cannot be analyzed. Each
decade is shaped by a series of events that often dictate the outcome of the resulting
socioeconomic conditions. An investigation begins with an inquisitive look into the events
leading up the 1950s.
The 1950s were an exclusive product of the great depression and World War II.
The great depression hit America like an oppressive summer heat wave, a constant
ominous presence of discomfort which is utterly inescapable. Unemployment rose rapidly
as job earnings decreased rapidly, thrusting families into severe economic hardship,
unrepeatable in America’s history. So, as with any abnormal circumstance, humans
compensated. People became fanatical financial savers. Every cent was spend on the bare
necessities of life. Only a few had the money to spend on superfluous items (Raasch).
World War II brought Americans out of the great depression. From the dusty dirt
bowl to the ravaging meat grinders euphemistically called the frontlines, trudged a line of
young soldiers dripping with ideas and courage, both of which would be brutally tested.
At home women entered the work force to support their sons and husbands across seas.
With posters like “Rosie the Riviter” spurring on the hardworking proponents at home,
women diligently assembled much of the machinery that eventually made its way over to
Europe (Raasch). These women began to accumulate money, but were unable and
unwilling to spend it, due to war shortages and conservation of popular goods and the
ideals inevitably left over from the Great Depression. Instead, families across the United
States began to accumulate savings (Raasch).
World War Two revitalized the American economy. Removed geographically from
the hell overseas and the years of painful rehabilitation of the landscapes, political systems,
and economies, the war scarred United States plunged lustfully into work. Factories
proliferated like fruit flies across the country, and citizens trailed the growth, pushing
America into the most powerful economic force in the world (Raasch).
Financial security allowed women for the first time in several decades to stay home and
raise the family planned during the hardship. Women could and did stay home with kids
during that decade–the resources existed for this. Women also found that with the return
of the men, most jobs were replaced by men. Women did not yet have the social backing
to continue in the typical male dominated jobs (Raasch). So far, an almost postcard perfect
picture. However, the 1950s, despite this facade of bliss, hid huge blistering problems that
surmount the 1990s difficulties and permanently cloud over the generation. Teenagers
formed huge gangs. A scenario plays our beautifully in the Movie Matinee as a gang
terrorizes the town, over a backdrop of missiles pointed at the Untied States from Cuba.
The movie is disturbing because this movie is a recreation of an actual event (Matinee).
Following World War II, Americans fell into the cold war. The cold war lacked the open
fighting and bloodshed; instead the cold war stirred a constant background stress. Nuclear
weapons proliferated exponentially in Russia and the United States, and the respective
leaders wove them around hoping the other country would back down. Instead both the
United States and Russia pulled new technology from their pocketbooks and forcing the
other to reciprocate (Raasch).
As the technology race continued, Americans geared for the aftermath and tried not to
think of the inevitable, utter, and complete annihilation of both the United States and the
USSR. Families spent weekends building a bomb shelter. Schools periodically held
practice drills where kids slipped under their desks, undoubtedly all wondering how the
thin sheet of plywood over their heads would save them from the destruction of the
nuclear bomb, a bomb that in Japan reduced great edifices to crumbles and threw the
permanent shadows of ashen-reduced people onto walls (Raasch).
Meanwhile in the South a civil rights battle loomed as blacks, tired of the apartheid
imposed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and average white citizens struggled to gain equal
rights, a guarantee under the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution. Most
minorities struggled with oppression in a white male dominated society, an often
overlooked condition in the desire to switch back to the 1950s (Raasch).
Progress to 1999, the last year before the zeros roll around on the Christian calendar’s
odometer. Crime still besieges society, albeit of a different type, and the nuclear family
prevalence decreased. In the past decade Americans endured terrorist attacks and
countless school shootings. I one opens the newspaper, the tragedies spill forth. However,
in light of the problems of the 1950s the charge flickers, an apocalypse not.
The 1950s and the 1990s are utterly and completely different. The 1950s was a post-war
time, where utterly irreproducible affects kept mom at home. The 1990s is a technology
laden information society, where media pries into corners and brings problems into greater
light including violence, rape, birth control, and AIDS.
The amount of nuclear families decreased (Two 1), yet the cause for the dissolve of the
family outweighs the difficulties, the equalization of women in the work force. No longer
do mothers rely on the male’s income, they can survive on their own. Their ties of help
flutter free and the American women becomes free since the American ideals put forth in
the constitution. These new freedoms allow women to break free of confining and bad
marriages and venture into traditionally male roles.
Crime obviously is a challenge to modern politicians. The problem states itself clearly from
the bold type adorning the front lines of newspapers nationwide. Our difficulties are now.
Yet when reviewing the past, the media is not constantly reminding us of it. The repetition
of material does stick in our head, like the indelible pop song chasing around in our heads.
The violence and abuse still existed, however in the 1950s mass media had not expanded
to its current size. Modern statistics of rape, child abuse and other domestic problems are
higher in part because of the lack of education on these societal ills. Today more cases are
reported to authorities, thanks to education from this “evil” media. Yes, these horrible
problems were present, just hidden from the memories of modern naysayers.
Demographics reveal that Americans grow up in increasingly diverse families. For a trend
likely to continue in the future, and that according to some is a “irreversible historical fact
the family diversity is here to stay,” (Schaffer 3) such attacks hurt diverse families and the
children whose children face little ill effect from the contemporary upbringing.
Many sociologists argue that “Family values campaigns put single parent families unjustly