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I Don’t Want To Watch Nostalgia Kill Our Democracy
Change is not the enemy. Being stuck in the past is.
With the US election drawing closer, I find myself baffled by why anyone would want to go back in time to when things were worse. I felt this way in 2016 too, but when I saw what happened when Donald Trump was elected, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The entire MAGA movement is based on reversing every bit of progress humanity has made in 70 years. My parents disappointingly fall into this category, and for the life of me, I don’t understand why. They’re smart, hardworking people who have built a wonderful life for themselves and their families — but they still want things to be “the way they used to be”.
This is entirely misguided because the human brain changes memories over time and makes them seem better than they were. Things weren’t “better” in the past, but we like to think they were. Our mind keeps our memories misty and out of focus, maybe to protect us from remembering all we’ve lost. We love to wax nostalgic about how things were when we grew up, even when things weren’t necessarily better. They were merely known. Time does funny things to people. It obscures events and tragedies, making things seem better than they were.
