A ROSE-TINTED PAST

Does anyone really want to return to the Good Old Days?

Rebuilding the past seems to be a dream some people hold quite dear to their hearts. I’ve heard it mooted many times over recent years, and it always involves some kind of return to or reconstruction of the good old days.

There was, apparently, a time when we, the people, had sovereignty over our affairs. Then that nasty European Union stepped in and stole that sovereignty from us and by a vote described as democratic (though to all intents and purposes it was nothing like democratic) our people decided to grab that sovereignty back. They decided that enough is enough and we must return to the good old days or moulder for eternity under the yoke of whoever is the present king of Brussels. And what’s more we must pay for the privilege by surrendering our NHS.

So when were those good old days, and what were they like?

Let’s look and see. Yes: there they are in my rose-tinted spectacles, the glorious days of yore when the only truth was in the Old Testament and the only real laws came from Rome via papal edicts. The fields were so much greener then, and look: filled with happy labourers with their medieval instruments tilling the soil or reaping the crops and bowed from the waist in agonised droves. How wonderful those days were, and how happy the Lord of the Manor as, in collusion with his local priest, he impoverishes the poorest and mocks their pain as they grow old (in their forties) and die of a mixture of malnutrition and overwork.

But he’s happy. He’s English (despite his relatively recent French heritage) and proud of it. And what’s more he’s got chums and they form the very first stirring of what would emerge in the later middle ages as an embryonic Tory party and own everything. But before then he is free to do what he likes because, as I said, he owns everything. And everyone. Except the priest. Oh, and maybe except the miller as well. But all the rest belong to him and he can punish them as he pleases. He can even hang them if that’s what takes his fancy. After all, what are owners for?

Is that the glorious past we want to return to, when if the Bible suggests you mustn’t do something (and the pope agrees) then you’ll hang if you try to do it and maybe even hang if you don’t.

No. That’s not the greenest of grass we want to return to though a few bitter souls may think otherwise, so let’s move on, leaping over a few dead soldiers from the more recent wars against the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the just-about-everyone-else-in-Europe. Those dead soldiers never wanted to be soldiers but, well, their Lord and Master recruited them, and they didn’t want to hang for disobedience, so they turned up with their pitchforks at the ready and their hearts all a-flutter and their sweet lovers tilling the land for them in their enforced absence. After all, someone had to do it.

Wars were fun back then. Men got killed, true, and others bled their lives into either home or foreign soils, but there was a nobility about battles. For the officers, that is, the sons of the landed gentry who oversaw the paupers and their bloodshed. Those officers were the embryonic Tories, and no doubt jolly good sorts they were.

Not then, then? The grass still isn’t green enough, though a few more may think it is? The rose-tinted spectacles still aren’t doing their job? Let’s pass over the seventeenth century and it’s bloody civil war and Oliver Cromwell and the emergence, slowly, of power where it ought to be, in the hands of the wealthy and well-heeled.

But by the nineteenth century there were elections! Not that the ordinary Joe could vote in them because ordinary Joes were nowhere near important enough to have a say in who ruled them. Nor women. They were even less important than ordinary Joes and had no say whatsoever in their own lives. Wives were property and that was that. They had to put up with it or be sent to a madhouse in order to recover.

There was still a great deal of hanging going on, though times were slowly morphing into a gentler age, so is this the golden era the moaners want to return to? There were factories popping up wherever there was energy to drive the machines, and even five year-olds got a few pennies for their sixty-hour week of toil. How glorious! People could at last afford to eat! Or most of them could, though it was folly to fall ill. The miracle of life-expectancy dropped a bit because often cramped and totally unhygienic conditions encouraged the scourge of disease, but otherwise life was a blast, yet there was still the tragedy of infant mortality to upset the sensitive. Kids died. It was what they were born to do.

So the Industrial Revolution. Was that the golden age, the good old days, the time we want to return to?

Or shall we move on?

To the twentieth century, a century that dawned with the Boer Wars in Africa, fought against the Dutch immigrants to Africa who wanted to gain freedom from we Brits. They wanted independence, and why shouldn’t they? It does seem a tad harsh that they should be under the yoke of a crown that’s the best part of half a world away. But what was another war? A chance for glory for some and death for others … and for we Brits to invent the Concentration Camp, where prisoners could be held in their hoards and subjected to…? Maybe this is the golden age at last! The good old days, the time of rich splendour, though there were still mighty wars to be fought and women, believe it or not, weren’t able to express their thoughts in general elections until 1928. And those wars… it makes one shudder at the numbers of deaths, the way just about every family lost someone or had to nurse wounded ex-soldiers until they died. Terrible, and not the stuff to smile about.

Except some people do. Because, to them, they were the good old days.

Now here’s a bit of a personal opinion, and forgive me for expressing it, but I reckon that wars should be abolished by international law and anyone encouraging armed anything should be incarcerated until they apologise and are castrated. You see, it’s mostly men who rant and rave and make young folks sally forth to death and rarely glory, for them, on their behalf. They tell them, to start with, that it’s to do with sovereignty, but really it’s the driving force that dribbles from their balls.…

Sovereignty…?

Surely we’re not back to that? We’ll be talking about the good old days soon, the glorious hours of bright sunshine, mottled heavens as evening falls, of twittering birds at dawn, of peace and harmony…

… and a handful of billionaires telling us what to do, how to vote and when, what colour toilet paper to use, and, maybe if we’re lucky, send us out to war once more.

A full circle. Hallelujah!

© Peter Rogerson 12.05.17

Reviews

[barleygirl]

This is a very thought-provoking spoof on "going back to the good ole days" . . . and it's quite stunning to see this from the point of view of being in the UK. There are so many parallels to what we're going thru here in the USA, as we fail to "Make America Great Again" . . . *sigh!* I admire your grasp of history & the way you sprinkle it in thru-out to help us see the overall point. Also I love the way you use a light-hearted sarcasm instead of harsh criticism (or something like that). Great share!