If a person of Turkish heritage says that they are proud of their heritage and proud of being Turkish, what ‘heritage’ are they referring to? How much history have they studied? Is it the Armenian Genocide? Or further yet, and the millions of white slaves from Europe, which the Ottomans used and abused for hundreds of years? Likewise, if a person says they are proud of their German heritage, what era are they drawing their pride from? Surely, not the Nazi’s. Or the Russians – whose soldiers (as per sourced data at factually.co) raped somewhere between 700,000 – 2,000,000 women throughout Poland and Germany. 

I make no claims about my own purity, being American. However, I have always wondered just where people make the dividing lines in their own hearts, between what they feel about ‘their’ heritage and what was historically true. It seems the pride which is drawn from this land or that is partial to only the things which one should be prideful about, while having convenient amnesia about the horrors which their forefathers perpetrated on others. I suppose this idea came to me when I was a young child, learning about the horrors of the American Civil War, and just how inhumanely those of African descent were treated in the South. Then I met someone from the South who talked negatively about “everyone north of the Mason-Dixon Line," as if that was still a real barrier. That Southerner was so proud of the Confederacy and its flag. 

Not that there was an abundance of pride left for the North, given how many treaties the U.S. government broke with the Native Americans. 

These phenomena could be likened to a type of nostalgia, daydreaming in chase of serotonin from a glory not lived, or maybe a ‘need for nostalgia’, born in childhood. A childhood like any other, when to a child’s eyes, fathers yet have no flaws and move like quick giants. And the father tells stories of glories had by ancestors of the past, and that his polite behavior was taught to him by his own father and his father before him – that he is a result of his own heritage. 

Thus, a nostalgia is born in the child, of a past that they don’t actually know beyond the old wives' tales of the parent. Their own pride in some heritage is really a pride in the positives of the recent-and-near community-culture. When looking at a Southerner, it seems to me that they are proud of being welcoming and polite. They are proud of food and the land, and for some, that is still, through oral tradition, tied to things like the Confederacy or its flag – which is erroneous in the kindest of terms. 

This historically-undying, false attribution of pride in “recent-and-near community-culture” which children (eventual adults) attribute to whole, ancient peoples and nations who at one time or another committed large-scale atrocities and death to other-adjacent peoples, is like nostalgia in the dreamy way it is envisioned - with only the positives outlined when regarding one’s heritage. This nostalgia is especially bad with older Americans right now. 

Ever since I was little, the elderly have told me that “I have an old soul" (which was never a compliment like they thought, hah!), but regardless, older Americans still seem to somehow find me and give me their opinions. Even online in WWII simulators, which I play, where I meet old men looking for some way to fill their time (this used to surprise me, but I meet more and more online), or at my frequent visits to the eye doctors, where I also share with them horrible, bad eyesight (otherwise, their voting habits tell the same stories).

Their opinions are usually that America is, and has been going downhill for some time, that children are disrespectful, that fewer people are going to Church and it is a shame, that no one goes outside anymore, and that things were better when they were young. But I have never heard the old men or old women thankful that the KKK isn't regularly lynching people of color, that women can now vote, that vaccines have gotten rid of the most dangerous of diseases, and allowed many of them to live far past the age of all the generations of elderly on planet Earth that had come before them. The acidic smog and acid rain present in the backdrop of all the movies of the 1980’s is now mostly gone due to environmental regulations.  

Is it the real past that the American elderly remember – or only the things lost?

“Make America Great Again" is the best tagline for nostalgia that has ever existed. At what point in our country’s past do the people who recall a "Great America” derive its greatness? The Trail of Tears? The treatment of Vietnam Vets? Slavery in the South? The treatment of the Irish, Catholics, and Chinese laborers? Japanese in internment camps? How about Allied Troops leaving homosexual men and women in German internment camps? America surely seemed great when I was young, and I would go to baseball games with my father and put my hand over my heart.

I do wonder, just how America has been made greater since Trump’s first term. Taxes are up on the poorest Americans, and environmental regulations are down. National parks and the Forest Service have had their staffing cut, as well as logging operations increasing manyfold. There is a new war in the Middle East, and American Tax dollars are still going to forgiven countries to the tune of billions. Healthcare is more expensive, VA hospitals have a staffing shortage, the national debt and deficit have reached mythical levels, and the cost of housing is so horrifying that I have no good words to describe it. Reading and math scores are at an all-time low, and the kicker is that Republicans have had a majority in both the House of Representatives for sixteen months in a row, which means financial control over the Federal Government and the grants they give out to each state. 

Nostalgia for some golden, bygone epoch where adults misremember the glory that they witnessed as children is but a lens that politicians use to control the masses. A lens that people often don’t realize that they have. ‘Heritage’ and ‘culture’ are loaded words that obfuscate the real and true, local, community-level happenings where true glory was, and can be had. I don’t see how older Americans can bemoan poor education, among other things, when they keep supporting the politicians whom they currently support. In this present place in time, that is a remark towards the financially irresponsible President Trump and his Congress.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

Opinions expressed by columnists in The Daily Record are not necessarily those of its management or staff, and do not constitute an endorsement or recommendation. Any errors or omissions should be called to our attention so that they may be corrected. Contact us at news@omahadailyrecord.com.