But I object to the “nobody died” part of the lyrics. First of all, that is literally wrong. Kids have been dying at a young age for quite some time, and often because of their own irresponsibility. Problems such as teenage drunken driving are not new.

What’s especially troublesome to me is this couplet:

“How’d we get from there to here/From Shakespeare and Math and Science/To shots ringin’ in our ears”

1) Kids are studying Shakespeare (I use Shakespeare as a metaphor for literature in general) and Math far more today than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The high school graduation rate is higher today than in the 1940s and 1950s, and far more students in the 1940s and 1950s and even 1960s took watered down courses such as “Life Skills” than today. This is not to claim that our education system is great; there is much wrong with it.

2) The idea that today we have “shots ringin’ in our ears.” Gun violence remains a serious problem, but it is not a new problem. Murders are up in some areas, down in others, over the last thirty years. School shootings, tragic as they are, remain the exception, not the norm. In fact, college campuses tend to feature far less violent and non-violent crime than society at large. In other words, schools (at least college and above) are some of the safest places in society.

This paints an overly-rosy picture of the past and an overly negative picture of the present.

Finally, if the best that a nostalgic song can say for the past was that at least “nobody died,” it is selling a very strange kind of nostalgia indeed.