They Never Was

Uncle Ken covered the subject quite well, I don't think that I could have said it better myself, but here's an old saying that sums it up:  "Things sure ain't like they used to be but, in a manner of speaking, they never was."  I think what makes the good old days so attractive is that we tend to remember the good parts and forget about the bad parts.  We even tend to romanticize the times before we were born because there are things about them that appeal to us, and we focus on that instead of the things about them that don't appeal to us.

I don't think I would want to go back in time unless I could take something back with me.  It might be fun living in the Stone Age with modern tools and weapons but, without them, life would be nasty, brutish, and short.  Then again, if I was the only one with modern tools and weapons, the locals might want to burn me at the stake for witchcraft.  Either that or they would worship me as a god, and who wants that kind of responsibility?  I have seen "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" at least once, but I don't remember how it ended.  It's all just a fantasy anyway.  You can't really go back in time, you can only go forward.

As long as we're visiting Fantasy Island, I wouldn't mind being young again if I knew what I know now, but I wouldn't want to go back and learn everything all over again the hard way.  There might be a way to do that if the people who believe in reincarnation are right.  The way I understand it, you aren't supposed to remember anything from your former lifetime, but occasionally somebody does.  Usually it's somebody who dies unexpectedly and wakes up in a young child's body.  Their memories of their former lifetime soon begin to fade, however, and they eventually lose them all.  In Eastern cultures that believe in this stuff, such a person would be respected, but here his recollections would be dismissed as childish fantasy.  Human memory is a funny thing anyway, you can remember something that didn't happen and forget something that did, so there's no way to verify or refute this theory.