Many people
I know—writers and readers and viewers alike—are of the opinion that people
living in the Old West were somehow “better” than those of us walking the earth
today.
Back then,
people didn’t use profanity. Honesty and square dealing ruled the day. Men
placed women on a pedestal. Women were content in the kitchen and keeping
house. Children were obedient, save occasional innocent hijinks. And while those
were violent times, it was mostly good guys in white hats killing bad guys in
black hats who needed killing. Truth, justice, and the American way ruled the
day.
Studying
history—rather than reading novels and watching movies and TV shows based on
celebratory mythology—will soon disabuse you of any notion that human nature
was any different then than now. Or at any other time in the history of people,
for that matter. Certainly social conventions change, but that only affects
times and places of misbehavior rather than behavior itself.
Back then,
while men pretended to put “the fairer sex” on a pedestal, wives were little
more than chattel, and could be beaten with little or no consequence. Ladies of
the evening were routinely mistreated, with abusers considering violence included
in the price. Alcoholism was rampant, drug abuse widespread. Child labor
routine. Mistreatment of minorities acceptable, even encouraged. And so on.
The only
real difference between then and now is that bad behavior often occurred behind
closed doors in those days, and was little noted. Unseen, but there all the
same. Now, it fills our TV screens and newspapers day and night.
Our blind
spot concerning the evil in days gone by reminds me of the poem “Antigonish” by William
Hughes Mearns. It begins this way:
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away.
