quotes challenge #1

Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing tagged me for the Quotes Challenge, which is very cool.

The rules say you have to post on three consecutive days, but I never post on three consecutive days, so it will have to be just three consecutive posts.

Here’s quote #1:

“Nostalgia is based on the assumption that things were ever any better than they are now. They weren’t. Things have always been lousy.”
–Jean Shepherd, quoted from memory

There was never a time when people always pulled together, children respected their parents, everybody got along, jobs were for life, and those darn kids stayed off your lawn.

Recently, the particular form this has taken for a lot of people is the whole “greatest generation” thing about World War II. When a lot of this was being pumped out (and it seems to have quieted down, at least for the moment), I was lucky enough to be able to get my mother’s perspective, which was that it was all, as she so precisely put it, horseshit.

But, as fewer and fewer people are still alive who were actually there, it gets easier and easier to turn it all into a big, rosy-colored Hollywood movie.

(Also, I have noticed an odd fact, which is that almost all of the people who are most heavily promoting this idea just happen to be white and heterosexual, and they’re mostly male, too. Odd coincidence, no?)