The "Good Old Days?" Well, not so much, really.

[Ocelot II]

30. We remember the old days as good old days because we were kids

and we weren't often aware of the bad parts unless we were directly affected somehow. If you were like me, a white kid growing up in a Midwestern suburb with a stable, financially secure family, those were the good old days as you remembered them, because things were OK for you and you were a kid and you were protected and isolated from the bad stuff. As you got older, though, you started noticing things - I was always a newspaper reader, lurking by the front door so I could grab the evening paper (there was one in those days) before anybody else, and I watched TV news, and I became aware of the civil rights movement and the cold war (and of course there was that whole duck and cover thing); I started to notice that there were two categories of help wanted ads in the paper and all the good jobs that paid well were in the help wanted: men section. And even as a spoiled white kid I figured out that although my own little world was pretty comfortable, not everything in the big world was all beer and skittles.

And for some people these days, the good old days were good precisely because discrimination against anyone who wasn't white was legal and women were treated as chattel who couldn't open a checking account or get a loan without a husband's signature - and, of course, abortion and even contraception were illegal. Those are the good old days the lunatic right wants to revert to.