Earlier this week, as my wife and I headed for a weekly jam session with fellow amateur musicians, we both felt a wave of nostalgia as we passed the town common in Norwich where we saw young children playing T-ball watched by parents and grandparents sitting on bleachers. It didn’t seem like it was that long ago that we were rooting on our own children and, for me, it didn’t feel like it was that long ago that I was one of the ballplayers. But in fact, it was nearly four decades ago that our children played T-ball and seven decades ago that I played first base on the peewee league team in an era before T-ball had been invented.

A few minutes later when we settled into our music session, waves of nostalgia passed over us as we went around the circle singing songs like “Jamaica Farewell,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “The Circle Game,” and tunes by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and John Prine. The music evoked memories of garage bands and hootenannies I played in as a teenager in grange halls, gyms and youth fellowship gatherings in church basements.

As I get older, I find that nostalgia is an increasingly dominant emotion. I not only experience it watching children on a ballfield or playing music from my teen years. I also feel it observing parents with toddlers at playgrounds, seeing through-hikers on the Appalachian Trail, and watching bikers, skate skiers and runners parade past our house in Etna. At 78 years old, I don’t spend much time with toddlers, won’t be hiking from Georgia to Katahdin, or training for races. I miss the time I spent pushing swings, taking long hikes in the White Mountains and the endorphin rush that comes from physical exertion.

In reflecting on how nostalgia effects my personal life, it struck me that nostalgia is having a similar effect on our politics. I sense voters long for the simpler times they recall, times when they worried less about medical bills, mortgages, tax rates and car payments. The carefree times playing baseball on sandlots and shooting hoops on playgrounds without adult supervision. I sense that parents long for a past when there were no school shooter drills, no need for mental health professionals in the schools, and no need to worry about screen time or social media posts. I sense that voters long for a past where the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were easily defined and the problems in our towns, states and nation were easier to understand and seemingly easier to solve.

This longing for an illusory past when “everything was better than it is now” is the dark side of nostalgia. In a study completed in 2017, psychologist Clay Routledge, then a professor at the University of North Dakota, was part of a team of researchers who looked at the impact of nostalgia on politics. His team found that “the more people reported having major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives, the more they nostalgically longed for the past”. In an article summarizing the team’s findings on the impact of nostalgia on politics, Routledge made two especially important points.

First, he noted that perceptions of the past can be inaccurate. He observed that as time passes, we tend view the past with rose colored glasses. In our personal lives this view of the past that eliminates our pain and suffering makes us happy. When we collectively recall the 1950s as a time when Father Knew Best, interstate highways and new schools were being built across the country, however, it means we are overlooking the fact that in those glory days of the past women had limited job opportunities, neighborhoods and farms were being seized by eminent domain to build high speed roads and black children were systematically excluded from public schools in broad swaths of our country. The “good old days” had some imperfections.

The second point Routledge made is that the nostalgia is not limited to conservatives. He noted that many liberals and progressives embrace an anti-Western colonialism perspective on the past, one which “envisions a past in which non-Europeans lived in peaceful harmony,” a harmonious existence that Western Europeans disrupted by introducing “human cruelty and suffering” into their formerly idyllic world. He asserted that “such a view ignores the reality of human interpersonal and tribal conflict, which has always involved violence and war in the service of survival, reproduction, and meaning.”

America was never as great as Donald Trump wants us to believe nor was it as bad as some revisionist historians view it. In the past, as now, everyone was doing what they believed was best based on the information they had at the time. If we want a better future, we need to find a way to avoid “the human interpersonal and tribal conflicts” that Routledge viewed as a given. If we do so, we might avoid the “violence and war in the service of survival, reproduction, and meaning” that ultimately prevents us from achieving the greatness and goodness we all want.

Wayne Gersen is a retired public school administrator. He lives in Etna.