This is an opinion column.

I get chain letters and group emails in my inbox all the time, lamenting what society has become.

Maybe it’s my age, or simply because I get political spam all the time. Maybe everybody gets these “then vs. now” emails. They seem to resonate with a lot of people.

I got one recently that told of a student who went hunting before class and drove into the school parking lot with a shotgun in his gun rack.

In the ‘50s, it says, the school principal would stop to admire the gun, then go get his own weapon to show the student. It was a bonding experience.

Today, it continues, the school would go on lockdown, the kid would be expelled and go to jail in a wash of FBI agents, counselors and panic.

And the folks on the thread ooh and ah about how senseless we’ve become.

I know all this stuff originates as clever and subtle politics, camouflaged in sentimentality and nostalgia. Hell, I miss a lot of things about a simpler world myself.

But if you think the good old days were the Garden of Eden you’re missing the core of the apple.

I grew up in a town where more than 40 bombs were set between in the ‘50s and ‘60s, at church after church and home after home. In a town where an all-white police force solved none of them. None of them. Because they weren’t looking.

And not a word was said about domestic terrorism. At least not until the bomb that killed four young ladies at a Birmingham Baptist church.

I grew up in a state where politicians blocked the doors of schools to keep out people who did not look like they came from Europe.

I grew up in a time when newspapers bought up all the paper and the ink, but equivocated on the nature of injustice, and asked no questions when Black people were again and again shot in the back by police, or security guards, or white people of questionable character.

I grew up at a time when there was a church on every corner, and every white kid inside sang:

Jesus loves the little children

All the children of the world

Red and yellow, black and white

They are precious in His sight

Jesus loves the little children of the world

At the same time ushers blocked people of color from having a seat in the pews.

Back in the day it was a crime in my town for people with different skin colors to play cards together. Cry freedom on that one.

Rather than allow all people to swim in public pools or play golf together, the city drained those pools and poured concrete into the holes on the courses.

Back then, being gay could get you thrown in jail. You could be fired from your job if your Aunt Martha was whispered to be a communist. What you looked like determined where you could live, whether you could vote, and who you could sit down with to share a beer, or a Coke in a bottle.

We clearly live in an imperfect world. Then and now. Not everyone has achieved equal rights, institutions are crumbling, technology has many of us on edge all the time, as a group we feel chaotic more than we feel hopeful, banks are failing, the climate is changing, a land war rages in Europe and we have to wait for new episodes of Ted Lasso.

But don’t give me thens and nows.

Be sentimental, sure. Be nostalgic all you want. But be honest with yourself, too. Looking back, glorifying the past instead of learning from it – hell, we now have laws preventing children from learning about it – doesn’t help us deal with our present or the future that awaits us.

It ensures that we won’t.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.