General

I’m not sure if everyone else has the level of nostalgia that I do, but it sure doesn’t look like it. The reason I assume they don’t is that no one else seems to long for a time before industry, technology, and the hustle of normal life in the same way that I do.  All of my daydreams are of big open and empty spaces created by the hand of God, not by some dude in a factory.  I dream of the day when I can cancel my internet service and get rid of my cell phone because I live in a town where everyone I know is a 30 minute walk from my front door and I buy all my groceries from a farmer just down the road.  The problem is that this type of world has disappeared, or is rapidly disappearing from this country and I don’t believe it will ever return unless we have no other choice.

The more I thought about the disappearance of this world, the more I traced it to a single and monumental time in our history:  World War II. I used to think that our country had it’s most radical shift in lifestyles and ideas during the 1960s and Vietnam war…but the further I traced it the more I realized that the 60’s were only the practical and inevitable outcome of a post-WWII country.  The explosion may have happened during the Nixon years, but the fuse was lit on a quiet Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.

Everything we are, everything we know is almost universally a product of the second Great War. (I can hear a big giant “duh” coming from the history crowd) Lifestyles and expectations of what we ‘deserve’ were all born into existence during my grandparents generation.  We entered the 1940’s as a mostly rural-focused, simple country.  We left that decade an industrial and political super power.

As an example let’s look at the women’s liberation movement.  The 60’s get all the credit for freeing women but it was actually done 20 years earlier when Rosie the Riveter beckoned women to the factories and away from the  kitchens.  This was undoubtedly a step forward for women’s equality (which I embrace and applaud) but it was done at the expense of putting industry and ‘career’ before family (which I heavily regret).  It was Rosie that made women strong but the family weaker.  It was Rosie who was responsible for helping to win that war but made McDonalds meals the inevitable replacement for women who no longer knew how to cook from scratch.

Speaking of McDonalds…WWII is where our concern for our body’s fuel (ie. food) fell by the wayside. We had better things to do, like win a war…we didn’t have time to worry about what we put in our stomachs.  We’d outsource that to Swansons or Kraft.  The problem is when the war ended our culture and habits didn’t change.  We continued to live in ‘war mode’ eating prepackaged or pre-prepared foods which, as we see now, was killing us just as efficiently (albeit a little slower) than a Nazi bullet.

This whole ‘organic’ food movement is a direct backlash on post-WWII life. When the war ended we have a whole lot of explosives material and factories that we no longer needed.  It had to so somewhere.  Then someone had the brilliant idea of putting it in our food.  No, I’m not kidding.  The fertilizer that we now buy in bags from Home Depot is the product of too many unexploded and left over bombs from WWII.  The non-organic food we buy in supermarkets is sprinkled with explosives, which is why it’s so huge and green.

How about The American Dream? (and subsequently our overachieving and non-stop lifestyle) A direct product of the War. We came home victorious and proud to a country untouched by the ravages of war.  We were strong and wealthy and we started to believe we deserved it.  The 1950’s were the living of this dream that we though we deserved. We lived high on the hog in our suburban houses, we all bought cars, we shopped for fancy clothes and built bigger buildings.  We all ‘deserved’ dishwashers and washing machines so we bought them.  We decided that we and our American Dreams were more important than community and relationship.  We worked harder (and more often) to buy more stuff…we neglected our kids and outsourced their development to Mr Rogers, Big Bird, and Ronald McDonald.

I could go on forever but I’ll stop here.  We think that this post-WWII world has always been ‘the way it is’…but in reality it’s only 60 years old. Our previous 200+ years were radically different in this country (not to mention our previous thousands of years before this country).  We shunned self for community.  We worked hard, but not so hard that we neglected family.  We raised our own kids and cooked our own food.  We talked with people instead of e-mailing @ them.  We knew our neighbors and our farmers and we lived with them and supported them emotionally and financially.

And now I wonder how to escape this post-WWII world. How do you live in this era connecting with your family, your neighbors, the land, and God without the distraction and pull of a post-WWII world that constantly tugs on your shirt trying to lead you to a more ‘fulfilling’ life?  I have no answer, but I can tell you that I yearn to disconnect from the hussle (not to mention the bustle).  I look every day for ways to discard digital life for hard cold reality.  Someday I might get there but until then I’ll live each day as an opportunity to move closer to December 6, 1941..just hours before the day that lives in infamy..and the day that changed America and American lifestyles forever.