When Nostalgia Divides Us

We need to build a new world, not glamorize the old one

Photo by Julia Zyablova on Unsplash

Forget-me-not. A lovely sentiment when remembering a loved one who has passed. It’s good to remember love, happy times, and long friendships. But we can’t get stuck in nostalgia. We miss what is happening in the present, and end up not preparing for the future, when we become prisoners of the past.

And when it comes to what we personally believe the USA stands for, nostalgia can act as a weapon that divides us.

Because while some remember “baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet,” others remember Jim (and Jane) Crow and La Operación.

A white America, a Christian America, a hyper-capitalist America, an undemocratic America that purports to be democratic but isn’t, a sharply class-stratified America that gets along by pretending it is classless: This is the project.”

At the root of this undertaking — among much else, of course — is a kind of collective nostalgia. And as I have long thought, nostalgia is a form of depression, an inability to accept the present for what it is along with a profound fear of the future.

Patrick Lawrence

Make America Great Again is a slogan that divides us. But it’s not just the MAGA folks who divide us. Democratic candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz further divided us when they campaigned on “bringing back the joy” while courting Dick and Liz Cheney, and yet refusing to acknowledge the pro-Palestine Democrats of the Uncommitted Movement.

Both parties promised a return to better days while ignoring the will of the people, who wanted to see major changes and not a return to the failed policies of the past.

Yet, many of our citizens are stuck in the past. While the majority of us say we want universal healthcare, and say we want peace, and want to be able to afford housing and groceries, we do little to bring these changes about. We keep allowing ourselves to be sucked into party politics, the Democrats vs. the Republicans, even though neither party has done much for the people in decades. A bipartisan support of extreme military budgets and endless wars has eroded the social welfare programs here at home.

Good old Ralph Nader, now into his 90’s, is still trying to get us to listen and to teach us to take action. Why don’t we listen? Chris Hedges, who has been warning us for decades about the very situation that we find ourselves in today, and promoting the necessity of prolonged, sustained protest, has been largely ignored. Are we ready to listen and act?

We have let the powerful elites run the show for far too long. And they keep pushing us to place our faith in elections. Concentrating on the midterm elections is not going to save us. The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just joined the FBI in a raid of an elections office is Georgia. Does that give you confidence in the election process?

We can’t vote our way out of our problems at this point. We need to start building mutual aid networks, we need to see our common humanity and stop allowing ourselves to be divided by partisanship. Our politicians aren’t going to save us.

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Thanks, Albert Einstein, for that advice. Nostalgia is not a solution. It’s a dead end that keeps us divided.