By ABBY DAVIS
Sheridan High School Student
Over the past few years, we have seen the revival of facets from our pasts. Classic drawn Disney animations have been thrust back into theatres as live-action remakes. Cult classics such as the X-Files and Twin Peaks have been or are being revived and remade. The Star Wars saga is being continued and is once again breaking the box office. TV shows like Stranger Things have appealed to not only the generations that grew up listening to Bowie, The Smiths, or The Clash, but also to the younger Generation Z; these media outlets have introduced or reintroduced the past as an ideal to many. Yet, movies and TV shows aren’t the only omnipotent forces in our lives recalling the past to life.
The strange thing is, most people reminisce on the greatness of the past decades: the wonder of growing up without technology, the styles that consumed entire age groups, the organized dances, or the musical renaissance that graced America with the Beatles, and later, Woodstock, soul, jazz, or just the sheer unknown of a world still being globalized. Classic literature still decorates our school libraries, and that is good. It is great to study the past and to listen to old songs and watch old movies, but the past cannot be idealized or worshiped as the best America ever had.
The slogan Make America Great Again is broad. What era was so great that we want to go backward and relive the past? Was segregation great? Was the Vietnam war great? Was the AIDS crisis under Reagan great? The second stock market crash? The environmental destruction that so many fuel industries brought about? What time in history do Americans yearn for? So many horrors and injustices were perpetrated by the intolerance that defined the past in so many ways. Yet, these atrocities that blot the timeline of American history are ignored in favor of a twisted and warped remembrance of a now rose-tinted past that sees the great above all else.
You may believe that only old music is respectable, or that nothing can beat a hot day and an ice cream cone from Twin Kiss, and that is completely understandable. However, the past in and of itself is not great. In many ways it was a dark time of racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as a time of progress. Nostalgia is good, great even, but we as a country cannot place priority on wishing for a possibly falsely “great” past. Instead we must look to the unsure future to not Make America Great Again, but to make it better in the name of equality and justice.