The Age of Accountability
Oh, the good old days. Who doesn’t remember the past with some level of loving nostalgia? A trip down memory lane, a glance at old photos, the stories our grandmother told us when we sat by her chair as a child all pull at our heart strings. So much so that some people think they’d like to go back to the good old days. They wholeheartedly embrace the idea of regression rather than progression.
Why do so many long for the past?
I don’t just mean missing grandma either. It runs much deeper than that. Politically, there has been a movement afoot to disassemble the progress made in the last century. Oddly, the days we think we missed were actually one of the most progressive time periods in the history of humankind, maybe the most progressive. Both socially and technologically, the changes were huge and comparatively swift.
For example, Henry Ford revolutionized transportation in the US.
Have you seen the two photos side-by-side of a street in New York City in 1910 teeming with horses and buggies? Then, the contrasting photo ten years later of the same street with nothing but cars? Yeah. Pretty amazing. Ford decided he was going to put everyone behind the wheel of a car and he managed to do that. An accomplishment at the time that few believed was possible. Shows what can be done with a plan and some determination.
The evolution of transportation is astounding but that was only a teeny part of the massive changes in American life in the 20th century.
From telephones to computers and from electricity to airplanes, this age of great experimentation produced a new world. Roads were built across the huge American landscape. Women were finally given the right to vote. The work week was defined as forty hours. Children were taken out of coal mines and put in schools. Public education flourished. Medical treatments, vaccines, health care even the average lifespan was doubled in the last century.
As amazing as that all sounds, most people don’t love the past for the reasons I just listed.
Their love affair with the past and their desire to return to it is far more complex than that. America clearly moved to the age of information toward the end of the last century. That fact alone has created a new world view in American culture. In spite of the fact that experimentation created great change in the 20th century, information was not abundant for the average person. In fact, the creators of change were learning as they go as well which is always the case during the trial and error phase of experimentation. Our parents and grandparents were not well informed. However, the highly educated didn’t have access to the enormous amount of information that we have at our fingertips either.
When I look back to my days as a teenager and young mother, late sixties and 70s, it resembles the Dark Ages on so many levels.
My parents didn’t give me much advice about life because they actually didn’t have that much to share. They came from an even simpler time. I use the word simple in the context of lack of knowledge. You can’t know what you don’t know. Because they knew so much less than we do today, they can be excused for careless even tragic mistakes.
Ignorance really is a kind of bliss.
My parents and grandparents were the norm. People hadn’t connected the dots yet. Changes were happening swiftly all around them but it took years for relative information to catch up with the change. So we had cars, but no one seemed to understand that allowing a toddler to stand on the front seat between mom and dad was a recipe for disaster. All it took was a quick tap on the brakes and the child would be thrown heard first into the dashboard. An easily avoidable tragedy wasn’t viewed as avoidable until many years later. Instead, ignorance allowed the deaths of many children and no one was blamed. It was categorized as an accident, a sad one no doubt, but an accident no less. Nobody was held accountable for gross negligence.
The more we know the more responsibility we have, however.
Unfortunately, for those who prefer wishful thinking to facing harsh reality, too much knowledge can be a threat. It rattles our sense of security, increases our anxiety, demands making plans to fix the problem, puts constraints on what we can sell or buy, forces us to rethink what we thought we already knew, puts demands on laziness, and suggests that we’re always going to be in a state of change and adaptation.
Sure people miss sitting at grandma’s knee eating homemade apple pie and listening to her tell stories, but that’s not all we miss.
That’s the bit that we romanticize about. What draws us to those memories is an intense desire for blissful ignorance. We long for a time when accountabiity wasn’t as important as it is today. We sense that with the flood of information, our days of reckoning are getting closer and closer. We’re anxious and even resentful that nothing feels simple any longer. We want to do what we want to do with no consequences. We want to drive down the road with our kids in the back of the pickup truck and not have to worry about what our neighbors think.
We want to pollute our rivers untile they actually catch on fire, just like they did back in the good old days.
It’s too hard to pay attention to so many things. We want to relive a time period when everyone wasn’t so sensitive because they knew their place in the social order. We’re tired of trying to find solutions and just want to reap the rewards.
It turns out that the good old days lacked the information to be as good as we can be today.
The last century was riddled with problems. Many problems weren’t even recognized as problems yet. The good old days was an age of great experimentation but collectively remained ignorant. It brought us to where we are now, however. An age in which we finally have enough information to actually create the best life yet, socially and technologically. An age where we continually add to our knowledge base and are better informed than any other time in history.
We can’t go back. We are where we are because we now know things which makes us responsible for our actions like no other time period before this one. Suddenly, our chances of creating a better, safer, more just world is far greater than ever. That’s a huge responsibilty. Our children will rightfully hold us accountable if we shun the responsibility. The outcomes won’t be considered an accident but gross negligance, even criminal behavior, because we knew better. Our choices will matter because we had enough information to make informed decisions. What we end up doing with this swiftly growing body of knowledge is the big question.
Just like we can’t know what we don’t know, we can forget what we do know. It changes our lives forever.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
