In 1976 in Chowchilla, California, a bus full of children was hijacked by three men who had the intention of holding the students for ransom. A dreadful 36 hours later, the children all made it home relatively unscathed. They were hungry, thirsty, and absolutely terrified, but they were also physically unharmed.
There were no cell phones or GPS to help track these kids or their bus and the fact that they were missing at all took some time to discover. When the children were able to escape and were returned to their parents, they were offered no counselling, no therapy, no real help of any kind.
Because the children were physically unhurt, and because it was 1976, it was assumed that they would be fine. In fact, the parents were given instructions not to “baby” their kids.
If the children had trauma-related nightmares and woke up screaming, the parents were told not to even go into their rooms to check on them, as that would be “rewarding” their behaviour.
Most, if not all, of these kids suffered for decades with the terror and trauma of their kidnapping. The very concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not yet a thing, not even for war veterans.
So much could have changed for these 26 kids if the Chowchilla kidnapping had happened in more modern times.
When I hear people refer to “the good old days,” especially in a wistful tone, I often think of the Chowchilla kids.
It’s a dangerous thing to look back on, say, our formative years and call them the best years. I went to high school in the 1980s and while it’s true that the 80s had the best music of all time, I don’t know if much else was, frankly, all that great.
Many kids in my high school were bullied relentlessly, gym classes were ridiculously segregated, and there was no room for kids who were different in any way. Were these the good old days?
My husband, an American, remembers road-tripping as a child in the 1970s and driving through so-called “sundown towns” where signs blatantly read, “(N-word) don’t let the sun set on you in this town.” Were these the good old days?
My mother talks about how in the 1940s, she and her siblings would take lard sandwiches to school and all nine family members bathed once a week, reusing the same bathwater as the sibling or parent before them. Were those the good old days?
The so-called Greatest Generation grew up in the Great Depression, then endured World War II. Were those the good days?
Terrible and scary things happen to people around the world every day, as do joyous and wonderful things, and this has happened since the beginning of humanity and will continue until the end. There always has been and always will be good and bad.
In 1274, a priest called Peter the Hermit wrote, “The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.”
Peter obviously wasn’t thrilled with the times in which he lived.
Going two thousand years further back, Hesiod, a Greek poet in the eighth century BCE, seems to have felt the same way. He wrote, “We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control.”
Even the Bible weighs in on this subject. Ecclesiastes 7:10 reads, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions” (NIV).
Particularly pernicious are the innumerable variations of “Well, back in my day we didn’t use seatbelts and I survived.” But so many people did not survive. Seatbelt use was determined to lower the potential of fatal injury by 45 percent, and non-fatal injury by 50 percent.
“Back in my day I put my babies to sleep on their stomachs and they survived.” But so many babies tragically did not. Around the turn of the century, victims of sudden infant death syndrome dropped by 50 percent, coinciding with new recommendations to place infants on their back to sleep.
Some of us just got lucky. Perhaps our loved ones weren’t casualties of lack of safety protocols, but many other beloved people were.
So I posit that these days, right now, are the good old days. And they’re also the bad new days. And a generation from now, it will be the same thing: the best of times, the worst of times, at all times.
