The ‘good ol’ days’ maybe weren’t so good
In last weekend’s Observer-Reporter, the first part of a serial, “Main Street Murder and Mayhem,” was published. It outlines the lead-up to a killing that happened in Washington in October 1864, just days before a tense nation voted in an election that returned Abraham Lincoln to the White House and as the Civil War raged on.
The story is the latest offering from A. Parker Burroughs, the retired executive editor of the Observer-Reporter. Burroughs has become something of an expert on bedlam in the region after having penned the books “Washington County Murder and Mayhem” and “True Murder Mysteries of Southwestern Pennsylvania.” Those volumes underscore something that becomes clear if you have the time to peruse bound volumes or microfilm of the Observer-Reporter or the 缅北禁地 – a century ago and beyond, this region was marked by no small amount of chaos and violent disorder.
Knife fights broke out at card games. Workingmen with stomachs full of liquor were mowed down by trains. A young man in Canonsburg was killed by a stray bullet during celebrations marking the end of World War I. Also in Canonsburg, just seven years before, a theater stampede killed 26 people and injured 50 more. In the obituaries in those newspapers 100 years ago, you rarely see anyone who was lucky enough to live into their 80s. Compared to the lives we have now, day-to-day existence then was pretty harsh.
And, yet, there was probably someone somewhere in the 1940s or 1950s who looked back on the tumultuous 1910s and thought, “Man, those were the days.”
Looking back – and looking back fondly on when we were young – seems to be part of being human. Compared to our adult lives, packed with obligations, responsibilities, uncertainties and “planes to catch and bills to pay,” to quote the Harry Chapin hit “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the days when we were young seem awfully rosy. Even the problems that loomed so large in politics and society back then seem less threatening because, in the decades since, we’ve gotten past them.
Two columnists on separate sides of the political divide each made this point recently. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative who writes for the Los Angeles Times and other outlets, noted that life in the United States 50 years ago wasn’t all that grand. Goldberg wrote, “I look fondly at my 1970s childhood, but it would be ludicrous for me to think such fondness was proof the country was doing better. When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean the runaway ‘stagflation’ – high inflation plus low growth? The lines to buy gas? The Vietnam War? Watergate?”
He notes that our air and water quality is better today, we live longer, have more free time and travel is much more affordable than it was 50 years ago.
And Paul Waldman, a liberal columnist for The Washington Post, noted that if things really were better back when today’s adults were kids, “America would have to be on a long and steady decline, with each successive decade worse than the last.”
It’s only human to wish we could slip back into the past. But, as with all things, it’s best to be careful what we wish for.