I've never thought of myself as longing for the old days, but recently I think I came across a good reason to do so. Actually, I have normally opposed the over-sentimentalizing of the old days which is often associated with longing for the old times. My thought is that each of us needs to live in our own time, and that just wishing for things to be like they used to be is pretty much a loss of time that otherwise could be constructively lived.
Of course I am very interested in the old days, very interested in the history of communities and of families, very interested in knowing more about the generations of people who lived before us, how they lived, how they survived, how they laid the foundations which we have inherited in our day, what they believed in, and how they sought to pass on their values and hopes to those of us who have come after them. I believe that what we learn from the past can help us live more effectively in the now and time to come. But that is not the same as just living for the past or always lamenting change. One of the things I have realized from looking at the past is that the people in our communities before us went through lots of change. I think we fall into folly if we live supposing that people of an earlier time have nothing to tell us for our life today, or about negotiating times of change, or if we suppose that real living began with the invention of smart phones. I believe that learning to respect those who have lived before us, and how they handled challenges life presented them, is key to gaining a good perspective on the life we live now, and on how to move ahead with a sense of values and good judgment.
I can probably think of more reasons not to long for the old days than I can for longing. For instance, our recession of 2008 gave us just a tiny taste of what depressions are like. The days of the Great Depression don't present a lot to long for. Likewise, the days of World War II are not to long for, except to acknowledge that sometimes the hard times bring out great qualities and courage and character in people. I also don't long for the old days when tuberculosis was rampant, or the days of flu epidemics, or polio, or the times when little could be done with heart trouble.
But let me get to the old days that I was longing for just recently. Back in 1984 I got my first computer, a Commodore 64. My wife will not remember those days fondly, because I often stayed up late at night writing programs and experimenting with things it could do. There was no Internet in those days, and I didn't do email. I was interested mostly in using the computer for word processing and financial record-keeping, and in learning to write programs in Commodore BASIC or in Commodore Assembly Language.
I got started with email and the Internet in 1996. I came eventually to use emai, especially in communicating with church members and with fellow ministers with whom I worked on committees and boards at the state level in our church. In those days we had no thought about computer viruses or spyware or phishing schemes. We were just increasing in our appreciation for the ways email helped us keep in touch and communicate in our work. In about the year 2000, we were beginning to deal with the dangers being presented by hackers and malicious viruses which could infect and ruin our computer systems.
A few weeks ago I was installing a new computer security program, with its anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing protections. For a time, the operations of the security program had me unable to bring in my emails. So, in my frustrations and fulminations, I was longing for the old days when we didn't have to load our computers down with security software. Computer systems today have to be enormously powerful just to run and to maintain the self-examinations and investigations of incoming data streams. My first computer ran at a speed of 1 Mhz. My current computer runs about 1,200 times that fast, but so much of its power is used for security, not work. It won't calculate spreadsheets or do word-processing any faster than my old Commodore 64!
Several years ago I had a preacher friend who was much disposed to idealizing the days of his childhood. For example, he said that the only bad things that went on during his school days were kids getting in trouble for chewing gum in class. I think my friend either didn't have his eyes open, or he was very selective about his memories of those old days. But, I remember when a hacker was not a bad guy writing computer viruses. A hacker was a name for a non-professional computer programmer who "hacked" together useful programs by trial and error.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 03/18/2015