{"id":112,"date":"2005-06-21T11:51:02","date_gmt":"2005-06-21T15:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/06\/21\/the-good-ole-days\/"},"modified":"2005-06-21T11:51:02","modified_gmt":"2005-06-21T15:51:02","slug":"the-good-ole-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/06\/21\/the-good-ole-days\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good Ole Days…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

…probably weren’t all that good.<\/P>
\n

I’ve lived my life with blinders on. I’m not saying that’s a negative thing. In most cases I think it can be a good thing. But I’m beginning to question whether the good ole days were, in fact, so good.<\/P>
\n

The CBS Morning News has been updating a 20 year old story from California this week. When she was a small child, she was kidnapped and brought into the middle of nowhere where the abductor sexually molested her, brought her into an old abandoned mine, tied her to the tracks and left her for dead. By sheer luck, she was discovered before nightfall (when it was predicted that coyotes would have eaten her alive). Twenty years later she has grown up, graduated law school and was reunited on the CBS Morning News. A happy ending.<\/P>
\n

But this story got me thinking about “the past”. It is without exaggeration that I can say over 80% of my current friends (and people I’ve known over the years) had extremely dysfunctional childhoods. Their traumas have included emotional, physical and sexual abuse, neglect, kidnapping attempts, drugs, alcoholism, death and disease. <\/P>
\n

I suppose there’s a chance that perhaps I simply have a high number of friends with dysfunctional childhoods, but I doubt that’s the case. Rather, I think it’s the norm. And I don’t believe it’s a generational thing (such as my generation of children from parents of the drugs\/hippie\/free-love age) because the people I know range in age from 20 to 60.<\/P>
\n

A few months ago I got together with my best friend from childhood.  We began discussing our pasts and she pointed out how the ideal childhood I recall is not exactly what was occuring around me. In her case, the mother was an alcoholic and the father (divorced) was an abusive adulturer. These things obviously affected my friend as a child…and when my friend reminded me of them 20 years later, I saw how they affected her, our friendship and her development. I knew about these things at the time (her mother was always drunk when I visited), yet over the years when I looked back at our youth, I recalled only the fun times, the silly things we did and the closeness we felt to each other.<\/P>
\n

I was one of the fortunate ones. Although my own childhood wasn’t perfect, at least there was no abuse or neglect. If anything, my parents were over-protective. But I even hear stories from them about their own childhoods (born during the Depression) that make me realize these are not recent issues. It’s just that these issues are no longer brushed under the carpet and treated as secrets.<\/P>
\n

So although today’s fast-paced society of being bombarded with computers and cell phones and TV\/movie violence make people long for the good ole days of innocence…I wonder whether such days ever existed. <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…probably weren’t all that good. I’ve lived my life with blinders on. I’m not saying that’s a negative thing. In most cases I think it can be a good thing. But I’m beginning to question whether the good ole days were, in fact, so good. The CBS Morning News has been updating a 20 year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}