Social Nostalgia and Triggering Millennials

By John R. “Buck” Surdu

Recently, I did some online searching to see if there is a word for being nostalgic for a time that one didn’t personally experience. There is no such word, but “social nostalgia” or “cultural nostalgia” are sometimes used to describe this feeling. As our once-great, disunited states are increasingly ripped apart by the five big investment banks and woke, globalist billionaires pulling the strings of politicians on both sides of the aisle, my feeling of social nostalgia has increased significantly over the past few years.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, but I have always envied those who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Admittedly my case of social nostalgia is based on watching contemporary movies and television shows, watching newsreels from those eras, and talking to parents, grandparents, and other people. It is a rose-colored version of the world, but it is nonetheless the environment I yearn to have. Were there issues? Of course. Racism and sexism were a solid part of American culture – even as we were (and remain) the least racist and sexist country on the planet. Music on which I grew up is now considered “classic.” Kids wanted to look “preppy” and clean instead of disheveled and slovenly. You could still distinguish the makes and models of cars rather than the styleless, homogenous blobs on the road today.

Recently a millennial told my wife that we old people “have to understand” that “make America great” triggers her generation because it means going back to the bad old days and that America wasn’t great back then. I attribute this attitude to the brainwashing in our indoctrination centers euphemistically identifying as schools. We are the only nation that teaches our young to hate our country, history, culture, anthem, and flag. Even the Germans have found a way to admit that they went through a terrible period but became stronger and better. Our youth are taught that because we had some flaws in the past, our institutions are irredeemably tainted and must be destroyed. They are taught that America is terrible and has always been terrible. They don’t specify what the America haters will create as a replacement, just what they will destroy.

The story of America is not that we are flawed. The story of America is that we recognized our imperfections (back to those evil, dead white men who wrote the Constitution) and worked to correct them over time. The American experiment is one of continuous self-improvement.

Leftists, Marxists, and woke America haters – and apparently millennials – assert that making America great again means more racism while denying the unyielding and overt racism of the Left. We were in a good place regarding race until Obama and Holder set race relations back 40 years. Before Obama’s overtly racist and anti-police comments while President, sociologists predicted that kids growing up in the 2000s would be the first genuinely color-blind generation. But the race baiters couldn’t have any of that! Now “color blind” is being treated as a racist trigger by the Kendi CRT racist crowd. Race baiters make too much money fomenting racial hatred and bigotry.

The America haters also believe that making America great again means turning back the clock on sexism while denying the misandrist sexism of the Left and the woke. I don’t think any Mega-MAGA semi-fascist deplorable wants to return to a world in which women have limited opportunities outside the home. But I think most of us would like to return to a time when manhood was respected and valued, one in which we recognized that fathers had an essential role in raising sons to be good men. We look back with nostalgia (social or personal) to a time when our schools didn’t punish and overmedicate boys to make them behave like girls, and we didn’t make girls behave like boys. (And don’t get me started on the lies of the transgender child abuse movement!) We believe there is nothing controversial about boys and girls, men and women having separate bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Regardless of woke ideology, males and females (the only TWO genders) are different. We are greater if we learn to value and take advantage of their uniqueness and synergy instead of vilifying how we are hard-wired by God.

I frequently look back to the 1940s and 1950s with “social nostalgia.” It was a great time. World War II’s Arsenal of Democracy pulled us out of the Great Depression (not any of Roosevelt’s socialist spending). Fashion reached its pinnacle in the 1950s. See here, here, here, and here for fun articles on 1950s clothing. I am not suggesting that women should wear dresses, heels, and pearls to cook dinner or that men should wear a coat and tie to dinner like in Leave it to Beaver, but it sure would be nice to resurrect many of the styles of the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s, we had “preppy,” but since then, the trends seem to increase smuttiness and sloppiness. I long for a time when looking presentable when you left the house was a common courtesy.

Cars had style and individuality, if not safety. I miss those front bench seats and tail fins. Somehow, we survived without air conditioners, airbags, or seat belts. We lived through the danger of lying down and playing games or coloring in the back of a station wagon.

I enjoy music from my era, including “classic rock” and many of today’s songs. But something is exciting about the pioneering days of rock and roll. In the 1950s, popular songs were a mix of “oldies” from the Big Band era, what we would today call easy listening, doo-wop, and early rock and roll. Ed Sullivan showcased opera singers, balladeers, crooners, and rockers – something for everyone. Songs were about love and relationships, not killing cops and fornication. The lyrics were clean. Clever innuendo and double entendre have been replaced by explicit vulgarity.

In the 1950s, radio shows were still popular even as television grew. (I still listen to all those old radio shows on the Old-Time Radio channel on XM.) With 5000 channels to choose from, I wonder if television is better today than it was then. Shows like I Love Lucy were funny without being political or vulgar. When my kids were young, I had to work to find shows where I wasn’t worried about unacceptable language or who would take off their clothes. With few contemporary choices, we watched shows from the 1950s and 1960s like I Love Lucy, Hogan’s Heroes, and Lost in Space. We watched a lot of black and white movies. Good guys always won. Villains weren’t lionized. Special effects have replaced the plot and characters in film and on television.

We have gone from Father Knows Best to father knows nothing.

Families ate together at the kitchen table.

I am not suggesting that “the good old days” were Utopian. America was strong and respected, even if we weren’t ahead in the space race and lost our first war in the 1950s. We had a booming economy but a housing shortage. People came from around the world to study our once-great schools and industrial processes. Suburbia and “rush hour” were new phenomena. While Thomas Sowell asserts (with facts and data) that black Americans were better off 100 years after the abolition of slavery than 50 years after the enactment of affirmative action, racism was an issue. Opportunities for women were limited, but a head of household (most frequently a man) could support a family, have a new car, and buy a house on a single income. Children played outside, face to face. If we wanted to play baseball, we just knocked on doors and put together a pickup game; there were no scheduled play dates. When kids met at soda fountains or street corners, they looked at each other’s faces, not their phones. Though they didn’t focus on foreign languages, schools taught reading, writing, pro-America (if perhaps someone jingoistic) history, math (not 12 different faddish ways to do multiplication), science (real science, not Fauci science), composition, grammar, geography, cursive, and critical thinking. When was the last time you heard the term “common sense?” Today, many Americans wait for a celebrity to tell them their position on a topic. Voting was one day and in-person, which may have disenfranchised some but also prevented cheating. While few people went to college, people recognized many alternative paths to the American Dream. While few people were able to fly, flying was a pleasant experience. Not today!

I was no fan of President Trump, although I did vote for him twice, and I hope he does not run again; although, I don’t want to see Ron DeSantis run in 2024 either. I like living in DeSantisland. While Trump’s policies were solid, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric united (or perhaps just exposed) the disparate tribes of America haters. I agree with nearly all his policies and respect his accomplishments despite the efforts of the Left, the media, and the Quislings in his own party. The phrase Make America Great Again has value, even if it triggers snowflakes and Leftists. MAGA doesn’t mean going back to anything. It means moving forward to a strong and respected America in which robber barons (like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Soros) and tech monopolies are emasculated and broken up. MAGA means energy, food, and resource independence. MAGA means plentiful food, including baby formula. MAGA means a standards-based military focused on preventing and winning wars, not engaging in woke witch hunts for white rage. It means a solid domestic industrial capacity. It means strong borders and controlled immigration, where immigrants come here, work hard, learn English, and assimilate. It means an unbiased Fourth Estate. It means “anti-decimating” 90% of the federal budget and sending power to the States as the Tenth Amendment requires.

It means courts that rule on the law, not on trendy woke activist emotionalism. It means being safe to walk the streets of cities, where criminals are punished, and victims are protected, not vice versa. MAGA means more isolationism instead of globalism, forcing our “allies” to pay their fair share and foreign corporations to compete on an even playing field. It means smashing the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. MAGA means schools that teach life skills, not woke indoctrination. MAGA means shuttering many of our colleges and universities that do not produce graduates who can pay their debts and contribute to society. MAGA means that there should not be an entitled ruling elite caste and that Congressmen represent their constituents and the nation’s needs over filling their pockets from the public trough. MAGA means equal protection under the law for all Americans, not just one side of the political aisle.

Today we have staggering inflation, incredible debt, rising interest rates, and food shortages. We have a federal government that is engaged in persecuting political rivals. We have destroyed trust in nearly every once-trusted institution. Every time they disagree with a decision, Leftists declare something illegitimate! The federal government picks some industries as winners (“green”) and others as losers (e.g., fossil fuels) – with no constitutional authority to do so. We have a government at war with at least 50% of the population. Our elected “representatives” declare whole swaths of citizens they supposedly serve as semi-fascist, evil, a threat to democracy, and deplorable. The FBI and Injustice Department have become the Secret Police, and criminal organizations like BLM and Antifa have become the shock troops of the Left.

We have a government that is a laughingstock worldwide and run by people who cannot even string together a coherent sentence. Our government steals from productive citizens to pay for the indolence of those who will not work and the debts of people who made poor choices. We have a military that crawled shamefully out of Afghanistan. Our service academies have become woke indoctrination camps like our primary and secondary schools and universities. We have proven to the world that America is a poor friend and a weak enemy. We have a middle class that is under siege. We have rolling blackouts because we let politicians and corrupt boards make stupid decisions to stop domestic energy production and close nuclear and natural gas electricity production as the government tries to force people to buy electric vehicles they don’t want. We have a nation ruled by the unaccountable elite and billionaire puppet masters. Nearly everything within 50 miles of the Washington Monument IS the swamp Trump harangued. Politicians think we serve them.

So regardless of my support for President Trump, with a strong sense of social nostalgia, I proudly proclaim that we need to do whatever we can to make America Great Again. We, the Sheeple, must take back our nation and make it great again. That doesn’t mean erasing positive changes, but it does mean reverting most of the negative changes. It means moving forward to a time when those aspects of our culture that made us great are not vilified but are instead leveraged to make us great again. Tell your millennial acquaintances that THIS is what MAGA means, not what woke, leftist, Marxist, America-hating teachers, professors, and media pundits tell them it means.

In the meantime, I think I’ll turn off the news and turn on some reruns of Happy Days, Leave it to Beaver, and Donna Reed. I’ll listen to Jack Benny, Glenn Miller, and the Platters. And I’ll long for a simpler time before all standards of behavior or comportment were tantamount to bigotry.