CARLTON FLETCHER: Sometimes ‘progress’ is dubious at best

Old days, good times I remember.

— Chicago

There’s something about lying awake in bed all night (damn you, strep throat) that brings out the nostalgia in me, especially when I’ve already solved all the world’s problems in my head and “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” gets stuck in there in one of those horrifying loops that threaten to drive you crazy.

So, while, yes, we do live in the most enlightened time in the history of the world, there are some things about the good old days I really miss.

Like:

– Cartoons that did not try to teach some eco-friendly lesson through weird characters with funny accents. I’ll take Deputy Dog, Lippy the Lion (and Hardy Har Har) over Bluey and Pepa Pig any day.

– I’ll take those good old baseball games that allowed you to spend days cursing umpires for bad calls over instant replays and ABS challenges. Sure, they have a better chance of getting things right now, but baseball has taken most of the human element out of the game.

– Original music. It doesn’t matter if it’s pop, country, Reggae or even hip-hop – which once was some of the most original music ever made but now is so derivative it’s nauseating — the Taylor Swifts of the industry have made it too boring to listen to. When artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s released a new album, you knew most of them would not be rehashes of previous releases. (And it was really fun to count the grooves in albums back then.)

– Political differences back in the day were so well-defined, you knew where an individual stood on specific issues just by the way he or she wore their hair. Now, with a president whose addled brain changes on a whim – when it’s not sleeping – people’s politics are all over the place. They change from day to day, in support of or opposition to that president, hypocrisy be damned.

– Even in the hip ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a modicum of modesty and decorum. Now, people throw out curse words and show off their naughty bits at the drop of a hat. (I remember once saying the word “damn” in the presence of a lady, and I was so ashamed I profusely apologized and felt ashamed every time I saw her after that. Now, a 6-year-old will dress you down using words you didn’t even learn until you were an adult.)

– “Fashion” that either exposes way more stuff than most people want to see or is so far out there you wonder just what the heck the wearer was thinking when he/she put it on. (A side note here: It has little to do with modesty, really, but do you really think people want to see the stuff you’re exposing? If you say yes, maybe go look in a mirror one more time.)

– Cooking becoming entertainment. It didn’t matter what ethnic group you were a part of, when you were growing up in days gone by, there was a specific group of food that you ate on a regular basis. (In the Fletcher casa, that was fried chicken, hamburgers, spaghetti and pork chops. That’s about it. I didn’t eat a slice of pizza – which now is a staple across all ethnicities – or Chinese food  until I’d graduated high school.) Now, there are as many cooking shows on TV as there are sitcoms of cop shows, and once you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all. I don’t care if you put zest or 27 herbs and spices on your food, just make me some biscuits and gravy and let me at it.

– The “professionalism” of high school sports has become outrageous. Not so long ago, teams were not allowed to practice during the summer. Athletes could “work out” on their own, but there could be no guidance from members of a school’s coaching staff. Now, football teams get to scrimmage against other schools’ teams – we were put on probation at Irwin County High School for scrimmaging against Warner Robins at football camp – and basketball and football teams actually compete during the time kids should have off to actually live their lives. Instead of discovering who they are and what they want to do with life, athletes must stick to their “jobs” and get ready for the season. Sadly, only a precious few of them ever advance to their sport’s next level and end up graduating with little skills other than how to run a go route and how to set a pick … not really skills that will advance their adult life.

– (A thought here: No one calls the obscene middle-finger gesture “the bird” anymore. Why is that? Too tame for the gesture’s message? Now it’s “the finger” or “flipping someone off.” For some of us, it’ll always be the bird.)

– Conversing at dinner is a thing of the past. I recently went to a restaurant, and the folks sitting across from me at a table for five – two adults and three kids – were all staring down at the cellphones in their hands. Not one of them spoke a word to each other, and the waitress had to wake them from their reverie to even take an order. Oh, and the youngest of this group was about 5.

Yes, I miss the ‘70s.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].