Romanticizing the past or having a rosy retrospective is a well documented phenomenon.
Last year CZ asked if she could interview me about the "old" movie "Sixteen Candles" as she was doing a unit on the 80's for history class. (If that sentence doesn't make you feel old, you did not go to high school in the 80's or earlier like me and all of my friends!). I said sure as I had fond memories of the movie and it is a classic 80's movie. So, in preparation for the interview, I rewatched the movie. Oh boy, what a mind-warping experience that was. I mean, I know that it was a different time. But did I really think jokes about someone's race or being cavalier about taking advantage of people while they were passed out was okay or entertaining? I guess we all did back then.(*) Shocking as it was for me to revisit a movie that had occupied an unexamined fond spot in my heart, it was comforting in a way to acknowledge that we have made some progress as a society in the past 30 years. When I think back on the 80's, I remember them with great fondness and even longing sometimes. Wasn't the past great? Well, that's kind of how we operate isn't it?
Of course things were not always better, I just have my own cognitive bias to remember the good stuff and forget (or ignore) the stuff that wasn't quite right. This is a great survival mechanism to keep up the old self esteem and cognitive illusion that I am the hero of my own story. When we tell ourselves we want to go back to when things were great, we mean only those positive things that felt good... we don't really mean the actual reality of the past.
When I see people break out that dog whistle term "cancel culture", it strikes me that these folks are just relying on their memories of their personal, proverbial Sixteen Candles rather than the realities of pervasive misogyny and racism that lie embedded in our past (and current) culture. Do they really think we should all just 'relax' and 'calm down' about casual racism, sexism, and all that other hurtful stuff? "It's just a joke!" At one point, I used to think that the joke was okay if I, as a straight white male, would think it was funny if the joke was about being white or being male or being straight. Well, you know what - a lot of times I did think the joke would be funny. Here's the thing: No one has used my whiteness, maleness, or straightness to try to make me lesser or to put me down. Even today, when I am sometimes made to feel like I am part of the problem rather than the solution because I have those attributes - they are not actually taking away any of my power or privilege. I grew up and was enabled all my life by that privilege - it's in the air I breath. No children's books I read ever put down any aspect of me. I found myself reflected in the admirable people presented for emulation my entire life. I never had to worry much about being judged or put in a box based on those things I can't help about myself.
So, if you are in the public eye and you get a say in setting the standards of what the norms are, I don't want you dehumanizing or objectifying people. When you normalize that, I am not going to 'chill out about it' or 'calm down', I want you to admit you were wrong and change your behavior or I don't want you setting the norms of society with your social platform. I want things to go forward towards greatness, not backwards towards romanticized nostalgia.
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(*) Recently I have reconnected with my old gang from the 80's. I mentioned the movie Sixteen Candles and one of my friends groaned and told us about how he was excited to show it to his own daughters a few years back when they were turning sixteen. His growing horror as he shared this 'gem' from his childhood with his increasingly dismayed daughters really warmed my heart as I had just gone through the interview experience with CZ.
