Your Childhood Nostalgia Is Stupid, and Dangerous

I’ve been thinking about Bobby Harrow*, who held Mrs. Martin’s class at Rancho Elementary School in Spring Valley, California, hostage for two years. He was boisterous and energetic, his mind not circumscribed by such effluvia as coursework or the fact that someone was talking. His nigh-pathological refusal to sit down, shut up, or stay on topic had the ability to derail the entire classroom. As often happens, Mrs. Martin ran her class to mollify Bobby.

Nowadays, of course, we’d diagnose Bobby with ADHD and prescribe pharmaceutical stimulants. But I knew Bobby eight years before I ever encountered the term Attention Deficit Disorder. In the early 1980s, he was simply high-spirited and disruptive, something his teacher needed to handle, and his classmates needed to live with. He was also intensely creative and a natural problem-solver, so Mrs. Martin needed to teach him channeling techniques, not just silence him.

I remembered Bobby this week, upon reading this spectacularly slovenly piece of GenX nostalgia:

Click to enlarge

Judging by the author’s profile, he’s probably approximately my age. Like me, he’s White. Nothing clearly indicates his personal background or childhood, but I’d venture that, like me, he comes from a conventionally suburban upbringing, where parents left the neighborhood daily for work, and school and perhaps the local strip mall were the only factors holding the community together. Neighborhoods like mine, and probably his, weren’t community, they were mailing addresses.

It wasn’t one neighborhood, either. My family moved around, pursuing my father’s Coast Guard career, so I experienced schools and neighborhoods in California, New York, Louisiana, and Hawaii. My parents always chose suburban neighborhoods, which they deemed “safe”; they’d never have admitted it aloud, probably not even to themselves, but that meant “White.” Therefore my upbringing was reasonably whitewashed, free of contact with unconventional demographic groups.

Because of my suburban raising, I didn’t know gay people existed until high school. Of course, they definitely existed; groups like Lambda Legal, the Gay Liberation Front, and PFLAG predate my sheltered Caucasian childhood. Similarly, I knew racism existed, but because I lived in well-scrubbed suburban neighborhoods, I never saw it; therefore, I never thought about it, and grew up believing it belonged to another historical epoch. I never had to know, so I didn’t.

Yet I definitely knew other things. Though I never encountered the term ADHD until 1991, Bobby Harrow definitely proved it existed; we just didn’t force-feed students like him Ritalin or Adderall to make them compliant. Similarly, I know, because Mrs. Martin told us, that she maintained a classroom first-aid kit that included epinephrine, because at least two classmates had food allergies. And autism definitely existed; the school just quietly dumped those students into Special Ed.

Therefore I find myself both willing and unwilling to forgive the tweeter above. For my first eighteen years, I didn’t have to know “different” people existed; I thought my suburban upbringing was normal. When I discovered it wasn’t, that some people had very different childhood experiences, I chose to learn and grow. Other people, mostly White adults, keep discovering different people have different experiences, and simply shout “nuh-uh!” It’s a thoughtless reaction, but I understand.

But I also can’t forgive people who don’t remember things that definitely existed. The simple claim that other people didn’t have neurological conditions, allergies, or even obesity, thirty years ago, only makes sense if this person and others like him willfully edit their memories. And to suggest that grade-school students sat quietly back then? Preposterous! Then as now, kids hated being confined indoors every day, and got stroppy and rebellious, needing repeated discipline.

When people younger than me complain about how lawless, crazy, and self-indulgent children are “these days,” I know they’ve made a choice. I was alive then; I know these problems existed, and often caused great disruptions. Yet somehow, I repeatedly encounter people who believe that today (whenever today is) has become monumentally worse than their own beloved childhood. And I wonder what kind of velvet-coated angel hatchery they claim they emerged from, free of friction.

Why do ADHD and autism diagnoses seem so common nowadays? Because we bother to look for them, Bradley! Why did nobody have nut allergies or Celiac disease when in your school daze? Probably because back then, people with food allergies just died, Susanne! Things aren’t getting worse, we’re just aware that bad conditions exist. If you can’t keep up, that’s a “you problem,” and you need to stop cluttering the discourse with your fake nostalgia.

*not his real name