What we have all known since we were young.

This is going to ramble.  Childhood knowledge is rambling knowledge.  But kids are collectors--of rocks and broken things and wisdoms they hear repeatedly until they assimilate them as absolute truth.

If there is one thing that will always get a conversation going, it is letting people reminisce.

It is not just old grizzled grandparents that enjoy that, although, given enough time, we do collect more material than your average 5 year old.  But listening to children and psych patients and addicts and strangers at bus stops,  I have decided we all have a few memories that allow us to hop from subject to subject using only our past experiences

The one thing I have noticed is that the absolute truths of my memories, fear of nuclear war, alerting when a plane seems to be coming in low, opening the windows on the east side of the house when the sky turns that weird green, what will happen to you if you use a Ouija board, why you can't let eel get cold after its cooked (it becomes raw again!) covering your ears when it is windy (those nylon head scarves were not just a fashion statement, not letting your feet get cold in the winter, not eating fish and dairy together, why mayonnaise will kill you, why crisco shortening is better for you than cow butter.  (there really are a million of them)  All those long held truths will make a person under 30 laugh like a fool.

Of course I remember my father worrying about pregnant women eating strawberries, but he understood the reasoning behind eating clay.  And my mother convinced that communism, the same communism that was tried by John Smith in Virginia (Pocahanta's John, duh) was the same as the communism of the USSR and of the Peoples Republic of China and of North Korea  and of North Vietnam and of Cuba.  And it was evil, because if everyone worked and ate, the lazy people made out like bandits and the people that didn't like that were silenced-permanently.  (apparently internal consistency was not required in childhood absolute truths)

I know from my childhood that drug fiends raped and killed people while on marijuana or heroin, but that prescriptions drugs were safe and good for you.  I knew that antibiotics were always a good idea and would stop any disease and could never hurt you.  (I hated doctors because every time I saw one I got a penicillin shot in the butt--colds, allergies, whatever, just in case.  I ran from more than a few offices in undergarments)

I knew the United State was the only country in the world that never did anything wrong.  Our soldiers were all heroes, our wars always justified and aimed at saving the world.

Yes, I was born before Vietnam and before the civil rights movement and before a lot of things.  My childhood was plain vanilla, no diversity allowed, we were all white (with a cherokee princess as a great great grandma), we were all protestant, and we were all middle class, (although most of us were exaggerating on that) and we mostly came from farm folks--that was true, true-true, but most people lived off the land at one time.

We knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, and we knew our future roles in the world.

My childhood memories share little with those born in the 70's, and even less with those that came of age after 2000.  But we all have absolute truths, and many times those are flavored by things and times we are so immersed in that we don't know they are skewed.  They are all wearing colored glasses or listening to birds with hard rock playing in one ear.  There is no absolute reality.  We know what we know and that impacts everything we learn.

It is a little like being brainwashed, a little like being raised on propaganda, and a lot like being a human.  We all are subject to it, just based on how our young brains work, how parents want to protect their children, and how parents were also once children just like us.

Changing away from teaching our kids and grandkids unreal truisms is like changing the educations system.  The teachers in the system were once students in the system and most of those liked it enough to want to stay in it forever and don't want it to change what they liked or loved or remember fondly.  Just letting go of chalkboards, workbooks and rows of desks with the teacher standing at the front "teaching" has been a long and slow process.  The "It worked for me so it will work for them" mentality makes people hold on: parents, grandparents, teachers despite all the research showing how few students learn that way, all the poor results, all the failures to keep up with other nations can hardly dent that absolute truth of childhood memory.  Poor students don't expect their children to like school or succeed, good students don't understand why anything changed, even though they themselves peaked out in high school or college.

But while we all know what is true in our youth, even though our truths are not identical, we can all examine those truths.  It's not as easy as it seems, it takes self-awareness and fact-checking and not just accepting that if it was good enough for me its good enough for them, if it was ok then, its ok now.  We must care enough about truth, fairness, whatever it is that makes most of us want to know--not just believe--that the world really is fair.

We can learn to laugh at the ridiculous stuff.  Learn to be less black and white.  Learn to be more tolerant of those whose truths are not like our own.  And be more patient with those that are stuck.
But only after we get that our responsibility in the whole thing is figuring out that what we have known since we were kids--what we have always heard and always known--may have nothing to do with any objective reality.

Enjoy your memories, I know mine give me great joy--laughter, happiness, bittersweetness.  But don't get stuck in the world you knew absolutely--when you were a child.

The world has always been more diverse and complicated than that.