Being 9 – Things were better then

The nostalgia that makes us pine for the relatively recent past so that we can escape our current realities.

Sometime in the early 2010s, “The Colbert Report” did a segment in which they broke down comments from three Fox News commentators. All three of them – Lou Dobbs, Pat O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck – had used examples drawn from advertisements from their youth to emote about how those ads expressed a sentiment they took to be quintessential of that time. They all lamented how we had now lost that respective feeling. Of course, these were just props for them to expound on the evils and lost ways the US had endured under the Obama administration, but they spoke (and speak) to an underlying phenomenon and a false assumption, one that Stephen Colbert and his writers rightfully pointed out. As they highlighted, the ideal eras each pundit was pining for were set precisely in their own childhood, around ages 7 to 10. Moreover, the fact that each of these commentators was roughly a decade or more apart in age meant that their expressions of longing directly contradicted each other, as what the youngest of them (Glenn Beck) considered a bygone era of optimism was already in the eldest’s (Lou Dobbs) age of declining values and morals. The point made by Colbert was that everyone wants to go back to when they were 9, because that is, for most people who are lucky enough to have a safe and stable childhood, an age where innocence and optimism towards the world and life are still intact. This idea of things being better than is directly connected to today’s politics of adolescent urges and not wanting to live life like actual adults, with all the turmoil this has engendered. We are so terrified of our now that the latest waves of nostalgia are aimed at even the very recent past, such as 2016, a year that was designated by many at the time to be one of the worst ever. What is the geography of being 9 that draws us back?

The “take me back” phenomenon, which looks back to the 2010s all the way to distant golden ages throughout history, is especially rife within conservative politics and is easily unmasked, as was done by The Colbert Report. Liberals and the Left, however, are not exempt from this, and their rose-colored glasses are also not hard to knock off. One person’s idyllic past was another person’s time of turmoil or nightmare. My favorite example is the so-called “Summer of Love” in 1967, which also happens to be the “Long, Hot Summer” where racial unrest sparked by police brutality erupted in riots in over 150 cities across the United States. One person’s liberal, hippie awakening – i.e., white, middle and upper class, college-educated young adults – was another person’s – urban, immigrant and African American communities – tipping point that unloaded decades, if not centuries, of anger at the system’s inherent racism. Both cultural touchstones will have evoked a longing for the “good old days” among conservatives at the time. The 1950s often stand for some kind of heyday among conservatives across the Global North. Most probably because this was a time when one could still safely ignore racism, misogyny, and the related violence against women, when colonies still knew their place, localized wars and conflicts didn’t garner any further attention, and both the West and the Communist East could bask in their victories against fascism a decade prior. This is also a time that birthed specific aesthetics that people still yearn for today. In the capitalist countries, it was advertising; in the Communist countries, it was propaganda. Both offered idyllic depictions of life in their worlds.

The Colbert Report made more of a point than they perhaps realized by choosing examples of conservative commentators pining for a past as represented through advertisement, as this has become the go-to manner through which conservatives highlight the values of the past they want reborn. Social media is often home to this, with people posting, say, an old 7-Up ad depicting a white suburban family having a picnic, and asking what happened to the old days. The retort that is often, and correctly, made is that this is an ad and by its very nature depicts an idealized, unrealistic world whose sole purpose is to make you buy whatever product it is foregrounding. Media literacy seems to be in short supply with the Right when they are casting their net to highlight their cultural norms. Either that, or their brains have been so cooked in a world made of marketing that they no longer remember what actual culture is or can represent and truly believe the media world to be a representation of reality. Regardless, they don’t really seem fit to be making comments on societal norms. Similarly, on the Left lately, there is quite an amnesia as to the realities of life in the communist states of the 20^th century and the general challenges and sentiments of everyday people who live in socialist or communist societies. Taking state media at its word is apparently enough to be sure that those systems are a viable option to return to. Personally, I never met anyone who grew up or lived in communist Eastern Europe who genuinely misses it. That’s not to say they prefer, or are even fans of, the capitalist societies that followed, but they definitely don’t wish the old way back. Anecdotal, obviously, but people then went on the streets and risked their lives to call for a new way, having grown tired of the repression, stagnation, and hypocrisy of those states. Hindsight is 20/20, no doubt, but it often tends to be those too young to remember that buy into the propaganda of those days. Faced with the complexities and challenges of today, they wish for the simpler days, overlooking how many people suffered, fought for change, and the authoritarian essence of those states. Ironically, the calls for a return to the socialism of old come from those who overlook their dependence on current necro-capitalist convenience and just how individualistic they and their posturing are. But in the past, in their mind’s eye, those equilibria, be they patriarchal, white-centric societies or quasi-revolutionary socialist ones, were still within grasp, were still possible.

The most enticing past, the one most in reach, is the one from our own lives. Childhood is a time of relative protection. If you’re lucky, you’re protected from the worst of life’s evils and stresses through parents shouldering the brunt of responsibilities, allowing you to live in a world only filled with abstract negatives. You filter reality through your own observations and the media you’re exposed to. Beyond childhood, even if that childhood might have been less protected, there is still less awareness of the bigger picture; life hasn’t been lived as much, and there has been less acute and less impactful disappointment. Nine, specifically as an age, is a moment in life where childhood innocence sits alongside the first stirrings of independence, both in agency and thought. An idea of a future life is sprouting, and the idea that one can actively participate in this world is blossoming. Together with childhood naivete, it can make for a positive outlook and excitement for the world; parents’ faults have not yet been fully exposed; hearts have not been broken; hopes have not been disappointed; stories are still believed and are entrancing. Dreams of future life meaning begin to form around this time. This is usually the last bit of innocence before life comes crashing in, and the step before the “awakening” of the pre-teen 12-year-old, the doubts, and the rebellion it begins to incur – one which we have yet to outgrow as a society.

Nostalgia, the actual word, has its roots in ancient Greece and means something like the pain of wanting to return home. This severe homesickness conjures images of Homer’s Odyssey or Xenophon’s Anabasis – men striving to return to their homelands as they endure various travails. But it is also Ancient Greece’s cyclical view of time, and the past as a Golden Age, that play a prominent role in today’s thinking. We, of the progressive future where a utopia awaits that capitalism or socialism is just about to deliver, can taste the promised land from our 9-year-old selves. It is a homecoming moving increasingly out of reach. In our mind’s eye, our 9-year-old selves can be that adult, can navigate that life, and can achieve those goals, individually but also on a societal level – in our childlike vision of the future, the promise still holds. As we have dug ourselves deeper into the morass of the early 21^st century, that childish nostalgia has shifted as the promise of the future deteriorated, and we seem increasingly trapped in a yearning to simply not be conscious of our present moment. This has increased through the internet and social media, where we can scroll infinitely through the best moments of yesteryear, dive into historic snapshots, or local scenes and communities decades and centuries away, awaken 19^th-century imagery and film to colorful life, or view and ponder curated catastrophes of the past that are safely located there and seemingly solved. Everything, even the very negative, is neatly packaged in the past and can serve whatever wishes we may have of it.

Recently, someone on social media jokingly posited the theory of American reality they called “everyone is twelve now”, which featured examples such as “I’m strong, and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm.” Of course you do, you’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables; I think steak and French fries are the only meal.” Hell yeah, homie, you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime, we should just send the army.” Bless your heart, my twelve-year-old buddy.” Obviously aimed at the national, international, and sociocultural antics and supporters of the current U.S. administration, it can be extended to many spheres of culture today. Everyone acts or at least seems to have the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old. Maybe it is the disappointments they have faced, the false and undelivered promises of growing up in late-stage capitalism, and the general realizations that follow through adulthood. Everyone wants the imagined past back, whether that was the nuclear family, communist ideals and practices of old, or some distant philosopher king-emperor who can lead us to glory. That longing for the past is nothing new, but our lack of maturity in facing our created reality, the yearning for a childlike past where we were protected from evils by some benevolent entity or entities, does seem unique to our age.

We conjure the past to help us make our point, and we forget the past so that it doesn’t mess up our argument. The past can conveniently be left or turned off; the present is here, and its outcome is unknown and unknowable. The warm glow of being nine years old, the literal glow of the television screen revealing a world we are beginning to understand as ours, offering us non-threatening visions of reality packaged in advertisements, pulling us into our lives with enticing visions of what our reality might be in the future. Those who are and were lucky enough could live in that pocket of blossoming consciousness of the world without feeling the weight of its reality, without having felt true disappointment. The present is, and has always been, too much, too real; we want to go back home – that home where things seemed fully possible. The point, however, is that they never really were. One person’s childhood innocence was another person’s nadir, the devastation of their family, city, nation, or culture. In an unstable time with an even more unstable future, we yearn not to have to take on the challenges we face, but they are not going away. Nine offers warmth and safety for many, a retreat from the pressures of adulthood and reality. We can and should provide those to our children, but we need to face our reality, or we risk setting the world on fire through our adolescent insolence.