Were the good old days really so good?

In doing my thinking about this week's sermon, taking the scripture and looking at different translations, pondering commentaries and such, I found myself in a corner asking myself this question:

Were the good old days truly better than these days?

As best I can remember, the early days of school began with a short prayer over a very bad sound system, then I plopped a hand over my heart and recited the pledge to allegiance while staring at the flag or at Mary Ann Marble who in the second grade was a sight to behold. I digress.

There were no Amber alerts. There were no fears of terrorism, of some kid bringing a car-load of weapons to school and doing away with whatever his psychiatrist said his problem. Sunday's were days of rest, and stores were closed -- convenient or otherwise – to make sure that rest happened. Black and white television showed us one baseball game on Saturday afternoon, and the New York Yankees were one of the teams televised every week. You loved ‘em or you hated ‘em, but you watched ‘em.

There was one translation of the Bible, the good old King Jimmy. We dressed up when we went to church, and we dressed down when we went to school. We didn't wear uniforms, and we didn't seem to need them. We didn’t have a diverse culture, didn’t know what diverse meant.

But were the good old days truly better than these days?

In the good old days, church attendance was up but racism, sexism, gender-isms of all kinds, swam in the sewers we never talked about at all back then. Tattoos were for sailors, earrings were for ladies and everybody smoked but nobody knew you died from it so it didn’t matter unless it led you to drinkin' and dancin'.

And if the good old days were so good, when were they good? The 30s, 40s, 60s, Morning in Americawith Reagan in the early 1980s, the balanced budget years of Clinton, when?

Maybe 1952 was good. It was a time when Singing in the Rain was the number one movie, but Elvis was just around the corner ready to bring the reign. Some of you remember that was the year the transistor radio came around, meaning music could travel. Things were never the same. Those were the good old days, you’re thinking. Course, for tens of thousands of G.I.s in Korea and the families that were getting the little messages sent home about their loved ones, those weren't the good old days.

Maybe 1962 was good. Remember the Beatles? Remember John Wayne? Boy that was the time, right? But if you were a child in the early 60s, do you remember hiding under your school desk because they were teaching you how to protect yourself in case of thermonuclear war? You weren't sure what that was, but it scared the John Wayne right out of you. And for those of us who had great imaginations, you wondered how duck and cover was going to save you if the big one was launched. We were the Twilight Zone bunch.

Maybe it was 1972. I was a teenager, and two of my favorite television shows could not have been more polar opposites of the good old days.

One was The Waltons. Remember the Waltons? Oh, that was my favorite show, unless you counted that show that was shown on a delayed basis at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday nights because the local station was frightened to show it on its regular time on Saturdays. Too racy. It was called All in the Family.

There wouldn’t or couldn’t have been too more different families.

The Waltons was about the good old days back in the 1930s and 1940s. Oh, it was rough, and they didn't have a lot of money, but it was such a great family that they lived in. And they lived in a community where everybody worked together, and none of the "isms" were there to haunt us. In fact, it was amazing how every problem in life was solved in exactly one hour. And I wanted a life like that—where every problem was solved and at the night, you know everybody gets together and goes to bed and says, "Goodnight, John Boy." I wanted it so much I got glasses like John Boy's and I walked around with a pen and notebook to record my great and deep thoughts. All in the Family was about all that was wrong with us in the late 60s and early 70s, when problems were, well, problems and things didn’t seem so all that darn good. I didn't want to live in that world, but somehow as a college freshman, I knew that I did.

There was a time when church was the focal point of the community. Everything funneled through the church, around the church. People ate together, shared their thoughts on the holy scriptures, worked together, prayed together, suffered and loved together. It was truly the good old days, the first ones in the history of Christianity. Then they marched to the Coliseum together where they died together, killed by the Romans for amusement as much as anything.

My point is this: What seems to be good old days aren't always so good while you’re living through them.

Unquestionably, things have changed for this country and for the church universal in the past 50 years of good old days. But I'm certain that one day someone about my age will be sitting in front of a computer that reads the thoughts of the writer and places them on a screen that is noting but air, and they will begin a blog or a column or a sermon by thought-writing, "Were the good old days truly better than these days?"

 I'm not at all certain what the answer will be.