Each age in history has it?s own color and style. The 70s will always
be grainy, like bad color photos, like polorid. The 80s will always
have video stripes and a neon blue hue. The 90s will have the date and
timed stamped in the corner in red.

Sometimes when I look at a photo from the 70s or 80s I feel sharp
pangs of nostalgia. This is strange because I was only alive for a few
months in the 70s and I spent most of the 80s in the throws of
childhood. I don?t really remember those times. So how can I
experience that twang of loss, of sadness and longing for something I
never really knew?

I?m not a big fan of those decades. I?m glad to live in this time,
given the choice I?d rather live in some distant future? provided
things get better and not worse. I do think things have gotten better.
 If I have a soft spot for any time in American history it?s the late
50s and early 60s ?still I like the present better. All that racism
just scares me. (Not that we live in a society where race doesn?t
matter yet) I like the beatniks and the optimism of the early
modernists in art. I like the music, rock and roll, you know? It was a
silly time. People still believed in the future.

So why is that the 70s and 80s pull at my heart string more? Perhaps I
must imagine what it was like to live in that time and to realize that
all of the heady dreams of the previous decades were not as perfect as
they seemed.

I remember the closed factories. The fires in the city. The soaring
divorce rates. I felt as if I came in to this world during the last
chapter. After something horrible had happened? something the adults
didn?t talk about.

What happened?

Will we ever dare to dream again?

>> I felt as if I came in to this world during the last chapter.

Many people feel this way, regardless of when they were born. I was
born in 1948, right after the end of World War II. I feel a powerful
tug of nostalgia for the 1950s. From my standpoint, the '70s and '80s
just seem too recent and vivid to generate much nostalgia.

My late grandmother, who was born in the 19th century, once told me
that she felt nostalgic for the years before World War I; in her view,
that terrible war changed everything, and her world was never the same
after it.

Every age is the same. It is only love that makes any of them bearable.

The baby boom, that's what happened

>Many people feel this way, regardless of when they were born.

Pinkfreud is exactly right. That's the basic answer. Nostalgia is
proverbial for its speciousness. That's part of human nature. Any
person does well to remember this when he or she catches himself
feeling pangs of nostalgia.

Two more comments:
(1) Just because nothing abysmal happened during an era doesn't mean
that there was no risk of horrible things happening at the time,
although the human mind tends to draw that conclusion.
(2) Specifically in regard to the post-WWII euphoria of the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, a lot of people had a distorted worldview back then
which was pathologically rosy: a vague confidence that outside the
iron curtain, all evil had been defeated forever and technology was
going to solve every human problem. No wonder there were withdrawal
symptoms following such an opium dream.

Don't worry, today needn't be the "final chapter of everything" as
long as people don't make that prophecy self-fulfilling. Every current
era will later be seen in hindsight to be the end of this thing or the
end of that thing, which is only natural. But not the end of
everything, so long as people choose otherwise.

Dear thefuturebird-ga :

How interesting. While reading your question I totally lost focus on
your question for an answer and became lost in the poignant, thought
provoking poem you have written, apparently unaware.

To preserve the beauty of it, I think it should remain unanswered. . .
but it "should" be published.

Thank you for it;
tutuzdad-ga

Ah ... Bring back Doris Day!

I love old movies and the advent of Video & DVD now allows me to
revisit those that I enjoyed in the past.

Sadly, they are never as good as I remember them and the comedians of
yesteryear are mostly no longer funny.

And why did I get so excited about my Osborne computer? 

Disillusioned dreamers turn into crusty old cynics.

Welcome to The Club!

Really a beautiful question and then our "crusty old cynic"  ( ;-D )
comes along with a typlcal Brit's hang-up with the proto-typical blond
virgin! Ah, sweet youth!
Indexturret-ga is right, I think: "Nostalgia", that we all have a very
subjective impression of some time in our youth, probably a time when
our horizon was limited to our immediate situation, and if we were
personally lucky  - and we weren't probably then too critical of
possible family problems (kids can be pretty resilient) - it was good;
well, it was what we knew and accepted and life was ahead of us.
In every generation, though, things intrude on that and leave their
mark, that may be stronger than any personal involvement. My dad, born
in the 19th c., like Pink's gran, as a Swede told that the three great
calamities in his youth were the dissolution of the union with Norway,
the Titanic, and something else, but it was not WW I.  Nothing that
affected him personally but events that stood out, perhaps incidents
that were steps to the loss of innocence, in the sense of a
recognition of thegreater, sometimes unfortunate world.

Does that make sense?
I, a few years older than Pinkfreud, have for ... ? twenty year
wondered if maybe this post war generation has  - is having -  the
best years of our lives:  peace basically (sorry, not for those in
Vietnam), but for the Western World in general, peace for longer than
history suggests we deserve.  We can't expect it to get better, or
stay this good .... The odds are just against it.

But our children see the world from their own perspective (mine a
little younger than thefuturebird). I should ask them about it.

Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

Digs

This question made me think of the young men who so desperately wanted
to get into WWI because they didn't want to miss the opportunity for a
great adventure ... none of them anticipating the horrors of trench
warfare ... and initially believing that it would all be over by
Christmas.

And many of those who survived were permanently scarred by blindness,
wounds, loss of limbs or shell shock (or 'lack of moral fibre' as it
used to be called).

Of course, WWII and all other wars have also had their horrors.

'What happened?'

History - has repeated itself.  The things adults don't speak about is
because of fear.  They know, but do not speak this horror we thought
was defeated in WW2...

Fascism.  And it happened here.  God help us all.

If you change the time (WW2 to WW'4'), the place (Germany to America)
and the scapegoat (Jews to Muslims) - We come face to face with with a
familiar enemy that has always plagued the freedom of people every
place, in every time...

The Illegitimate Authority of 'False Prophets'...in the previous
century they were known as Nazis and Fascists - in this century they
are known as NeoCons, 'new conservatives'...it's name has been changed
but it's character has not - it is fascism.

I understand your nostalgia, the technology is not what is really the
point of the 'look back' - rather - it was the assured freedom we
enjoyed, and sadly, have taken for granted, and horribly, has one
small goosestep at a time declined.  Will it be destroyed?

'Will we ever dare to dream again?'

Yes, we are not blind to the path we are on, tho events caused us to
leave that path for a short time.  We are not deaf, for we are hearing
the calls to return to real freedom, and not just hearing, but
listening, for freedom rings in every person's heart.  And as the
couragous few speak, we look and listen and discover...

The Will to Power will never defeat The Will to Freedom.

-MiniM