“He apologized for his infraction, and the boys promised to never do that. Qualifying that with ‘only if they had to’ remained unspoken, although stored in the back of their minds should any future neighborhood encounter resemble The Lord of the Flies, and not The Little Rascals.” – Chapter One, Give Me Something To Do.
The foregoing appears in the narrative of what I hope will become my fifth novel, with the working title Give Me Something To Do. While not exactly a memoir, the story evokes nostalgia about the experiences of a family with a single mother persevering in the 1950s.
Nostalgia has been in public conversation recently in various outlets. In “Why Gen Z is resurrecting the 1990s,” appearing Aug. 24, 2025, in the New York Times, Dr. Clay Routledge writes: “A 2023 survey conducted by the Harris Poll… found that 80 percent of Gen Z adults (born after 1997) were worried that their generation was too dependent on technology. As a researcher who specializes in the psychology of nostalgia, I was struck by one finding in particular: Sixty percent of Gen Z adults said that they wished they could return to a time before everyone was ‘plugged in.’”
Routledge is the vice president of research and the director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, although some research suggests that it leans right, which fits when you’re talking about nostalgia. The word first appeared in 1688 from a Swiss physician to describe homesickness, using the Greek words nóstos (‘homecoming’) and álgos (‘pain’).
In my part-time job driving bus for a senior assisted living community, I sometimes hear residents reminisce about their lives and experiences. When I ask someone about their life’s work, or where they lived, they seem to enjoy sharing their stories. Some are quite remarkable.
Another perspective comes from Dr. Arthur Brooks. In his weekly e-newsletter, Brooks writes: “Psychologists generally define nostalgia as a self-conscious, social emotion, bittersweet but predominantly positive… It provides a unique power to combat unhappiness because it allows you to rewrite what was unhappy at the time as sweet, meaningful, or funny today… provoking nostalgia in experiments strengthens people’s social bonds, boosts their positive feelings about themselves, and improves their mood. Similar research has shown that when people feel nostalgia, it can bolster their sense of life’s meaning, lower an existential reaction to the idea of death, increase spirituality, and raise optimism.”
The old neighborhood
None of such deep analytics goes through my mind as I ride my bike through the old neighborhood of my childhood. I really don’t feel much nostalgia or emotion as I pass by the big, square house where I spent most of my childhood. Across the street sits my former elementary school, which now is a mosque.
The novel-in-progress is based on the underlying theme of hardship being conquered by family, faith, friends, and community. I can relate to Brooks’ comments about nostalgia as “bittersweet but predominantly positive.” The working title, Give Me Something to Do, is inspired by words reportedly said by Guri Endreson in the U.S.-Dakota conflict of 1862, after escaping an attack that killed her husband and a son.
Set in the early 1950s, the novel will offer further fodder for nostalgia in recalling a time when law, rules, facts, science, education, good government, and fair play mattered, even if falling short now and then. Ironically, many people today who are wishing for a return to those values are following the wrong political crowd.
In the 1950s there were many progressive Republicans. The novel mentions Minnesota Governor Luther Youngdahl, a Republican who led the way for much-needed reform of the state’s mental health care system and its institutions. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about the power of the “military-industrial complex,” and authorized the interstate highway system. That’s’ the ‘sweet’ part.
The ‘bitter’ part is seen in the deep racial and gender inequities of the time, civil and voting rights, and the debacle of Viet Nam. These and some economic disruption and cultural upheaval helped bring about the demise of the Modern Era, ushering in the Postmodern Era which still plagues us today. For decades it has dominated the arts, literature, and culture, where truth is relative and cynicism prevails. Today it has flooded government and politics.
Postmodern nadir
I remain hopeful that the current administration represents the nadir (lowest point) of Postmodern Era politics. In terms of the assaults on the rule of law, separate but equal branches of government, legal immigration, and destruction of government agencies, we can’t get much lower than we are today.
Seeing the citizen protests and outbursts against the current regime, it seems that the general public may be experiencing some nostalgia about the common good and good government. It’s okay to be a little rascally now and then, politically speaking, as long as we retain our basic values about past fair play when factions and parties competed within a framework of generally good government in a democratic republic. That points to the Metamodern Era, which has been addressed in previous posts.
Returning to the opening metaphor, it illustrates that politics is a combination of both, at the same time, cut-throat and fair play. For the time being in the U.S. it seems that there is too much The Lord of the Flies and not enough The Little Rascals. We recognize and acknowledge the current disruption, but we cling to the values that created American democracy.
