The best thing about the past is that it is an ever changing Protean dreamscape. Or something like that anyway. What I mean is that how we think about the past can change from day to day, and sometimes even minute-to-minute. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, grisly depressing episodes from my past congregate together in my mind, like an ominous blob of whinging despair, and I slump around viewing my life through grey-tinted, and probably slightly-cracked, spectacles. Cheap NHS ones, from the eighties, usually.
Conversely, when I ‘m feeling chipper, and things are ticking along nicely, the past is a paradise of taken opportunities and lessons learnt. Everything that happened made me stronger, and there was always love, and pockets full of joy, and other sugary shit like that
Just because it’s gone, it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.
One of the more irritating effects of the phenomenon is a twatty tendency to think that when were younger, we were less offensive/rude/hard/soft/feral/molly-coddled than the current younger generation. This doesn’t apply to just teens. I’m sure most of the twenty-somethings I know are considerably less cool than I was when I was in my twenties. Although this bit is probably true. But I’m in a good mood, so I would think that. Tomorrow, you may find me a grave man entertaining visions of a semi-overweight sociopath floundering from one bar to another when contemplating the very same period of my worthless failed existence.
I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between. I was probably a drunken twat, but a bit hip with it. Anyone who knows me from that period, please refrain from sharing your memories with me. I like the fug.
This phenomenon goes beyond misremembering our own pasts, to misremembering general society, and, in the case of Creationists, misremembering the Universe. Dinosaurs are not dragons from three thousand years ago, dickheads.
Following the recent riot-lootings, this rewriting of days of yore, to the detriment of the present, is taking a worrying turn. CallMeDave Cameron is spouting sinister platitudes about the slow decay of society. As if he has anything with which to compare it. I’m sure the worst disruption of his school years was a squabble over who’d lost the biscuit game, or the crushing despair of realising one’s brogues were from a less reputable Saville Row establishment than one’s fag.
Personally, I don’t notice massive differences. When I was a child we had riots, we had single parent families, people got murdered, Marathon was a better name than Snickers, and old people banged on, relentlessly, about how out-of-control we pesky kids were.
But CMD has decided that we’re going to hell-in-a-looted-handcart, and that society is going to descend into a Lord of the Flies kiilfest unless he steps up to the plate and whacks some respect into the oiks who dare to taint his idea of the perfect world. A world in which the oiks doff their caps to their richers and betters, and he sits on a throne of slave-gold, laughing as chavs and hoodies are forced to work in his dungeons for a token monthly stipend.
And he seems to have mustered some support in this view. Until recently there was common Facebook meme about ‘You Know You Grew Up in the Eighties if…’ which basically suggests all children are weak-arsed shits who are scared of daylight, and couldn’t organise a piss-up in brewery, and even if they could, they’d be shitfaced after two Bacardi Breezers.
Now the more common feeling crawling the same pages is that the modern youth are all baby Mafiosa, with the criminal organisational skills of a John Gotti , the physique of The Thing erratically coupled with the temperament of Captain Cavemen, and Weren’t We All Much Nicer When We Were Kids. I’ve even heard people complaining that in their youth, people only slashed with knives, but the modern young hoodlum stabs, which is much less respectful because a slash, y’know, can be stitched but a stab can kill. An unusual perspective, at least from where I’m standing. Over here, far away from the person who told me that.
It would be churlish to bring up CMD’s Bullingdon Club riots here, and to point out that even the most over-privileged of Tory pigfucks have episodes of anti-social behaviour, but I’m a churlish kinda guy. If anyone can honestly say they weren’t a twat at some time in their youth, and didn’t do something their older selves would thoroughly disapprove of, then either they’re lying, or very, very dull. The riots were a step too far, but they were the result of very complex social issues and agendas. Not everyone involved was one of Satan’s hooded minions, nor were they all fallen angels. Banging out Draconian sentences and reactionary policies, on the grounds that the safety of the world depends on it, is at best misguided, and at worst disingenuous.
They may dress differently, listen to different music, and have technology we only saw on Buck Rogers, but essentially they’re the same as we were. The kids are alright.
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