It's basically a nostalgia kick, a kind of "gosh, things sure were better back in my day" song. I hear this song at work, sometimes several times a day, and have never really been all that impressed with it. When people look back at the way things were they tend to don a pair of rose-tinted glasses and forget the problems that were there and only look at the good. A lot of the time things only seemed simpler or better, usually because at the time said person was unaware of some of the darker sides of life. Glorifying the past is something that every generation seems to do at some point, and it's usually not justified.
Fifty years ago the civil rights movement was still going on and African Americans (and other minorities) were still openly discriminated against. America was in the middle of the Vietnam War...life was not all moonbeams and sunshine, unless you were a kid too young to understand what was going on around you. It was an incendiary time in American history, a time when this nation was far more fractious than it is today...despite the song writer's belief that cell phones and blogs create division.
If anything we haven't changed at all. The only difference between people now and people than is that we have more things to lose ourselves in than they did back then. But is that really a negative thing? People are no more divisive than they were back then, we just have more way of expressing our differences.
Of course, I have no idea what part of the past the song writer is actually talking about; I took fifty years from someone else's comment and used it to show that were not as great back then as has been implied. Pick an era and I'll demonstrate that things were not as idyllic as nostalgic old timers would like us to believe.
And for the record, we have never been anything other than a slice of American pie.
It's basically a nostalgia kick, a kind of "gosh, things sure were better back in my day" song. I hear this song at work, sometimes several times a day, and have never really been all that impressed with it. When people look back at the way things were they tend to don a pair of rose-tinted glasses and forget the problems that were there and only look at the good. A lot of the time things only seemed simpler or better, usually because at the time said person was unaware of some of the darker sides of life. Glorifying the past is something that every generation seems to do at some point, and it's usually not justified.
Fifty years ago the civil rights movement was still going on and African Americans (and other minorities) were still openly discriminated against. America was in the middle of the Vietnam War...life was not all moonbeams and sunshine, unless you were a kid too young to understand what was going on around you. It was an incendiary time in American history, a time when this nation was far more fractious than it is today...despite the song writer's belief that cell phones and blogs create division.
If anything we haven't changed at all. The only difference between people now and people than is that we have more things to lose ourselves in than they did back then. But is that really a negative thing? People are no more divisive than they were back then, we just have more way of expressing our differences.
Of course, I have no idea what part of the past the song writer is actually talking about; I took fifty years from someone else's comment and used it to show that were not as great back then as has been implied. Pick an era and I'll demonstrate that things were not as idyllic as nostalgic old timers would like us to believe.
And for the record, we have never been anything other than a slice of American pie.