Fox News’ Laura Ingraham’s recent (8/9/18) racist sermon about the national emergency of changing U.S. demographics to her nearly all white audience raises many questions, but to me one stands out above all others. Why do whites think they’re losing their societal status, their positions of privilege? For simplification let us broadly define the elites and the privileged as those that have money, education, and/or political power. It’s not hard to see via casual observation then, that most elites are white. It’s equally easy to see that far and away most whites are not elites and never have been.
For example, my family came to to this continent 384 years ago. They paid for their voyage by working as servants for the elite passengers. We fought for the Revolution. Over the centuries we’ve been mostly farmers, but also soldiers, laborers, factory workers, janitors, secretaries, truck drivers and generally all jobs considered working class; whatever we had to do to keep our families fed. Here and there a few acquired higher education and became teachers, but we have never been counted among the elite.
So, what could we possibly be losing to changing demographics? What’s going on?
Could it be in part because it is human nature to reminisce nostalgically upon a past that never existed; i.e. the good ol’ days? I have lived with six generations of my family. The oldest always regale the young ones with tales of the good ol’ days, back when they were growing up. I remember my grandparents reminiscing to me about their good ol’ days, which was kind of odd considering they survived the great depression. As they told it, I was growing up in difficult times. Now, however, when I think upon my own youth, my memories are predominantly good. This in spite of the fact that today I still bear the scars of the many violences I endured as a child and my struggles to find work as a unskilled young man. Still, I remember my youth as the good ol’ days. I was pretty happy.
Even so for my wife, who grew up through famine and the throes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a small child she witnessed the mob hanging people to death and gunfire in the streets. As a little girl a stranger once whisked her out of harms way, protecting her from the mob. She was separated from her family, she sent to boarding school, her parents to work in the countryside. Still, these memories rarely emerge. Mostly she reminisces about lazy, hot days of summer spent swimming with her friends in the river (she nearly drowned once). She remembers fondly the sweetness of fermented rice topped with an egg that her grandmother would make for her and the simple treats her father would sometimes manage to bring home for her. To hear her tell it, her childhood was full of happiness and adventure.
I wonder, why is that?
Perhaps it is in part as children we view the world through children’s eyes which are full of life, energy, optimism, and expectations. As children we see the world with a sense of wonder and awe, every day a new learning experience. This continues as we mature and begin our young adult lives. But as we age, maybe we remember our early lives with a comforting sense of nostalgia because our early memories were imprinted through the eyes of children. The comfort of those memories may even be inflated when compared to a world viewed through the aging eyes of an adult inching ever closer to the grave.
Some things I’ve learned in my life is that everything changes. Technology changes, borders change, we change (with age), climate changes… And no matter how hard we try, nothing ever goes back to the way it was.
I think we should be careful not to let the skewed memories of our youth influence how we shape our children’s future. Even if we could take things back to the way they were, we wouldn’t recognize what we accomplished, because we no longer see through they eyes of children.