03.07.07 – Nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” is Bullsh*t

Whether it’s the 1950’s, 60’s or ‘80s that you pine for, remember this; times have always been tough for the average American. To get anywhere at all requires a lot of preparation, effort, sweat, and a good dose of luck.

“Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the ‘flexibility’ of our workforce", say one Washington Post blogger, "decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh."