prompt: mistake, title: history depletes itself in misc. flash fiction

I’m often disturbed by the knowledge the internet provides me with about the worst parts of the sickest human brains. Reddit basement-incels apparently waste their life-times dreaming of the Roman Empire, with a received nostalgia for it, at least for what they believe the Roman Empire was. Women were property and life was pretty much about killing foreigners to steal their grain, but that sounds great to adolescent neo-Nazis raised by Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Lack of electricity or antibiotics wouldn’t faze them. All that matters is that belief a wife-slave would be issued to them at legal adulthoods. It’s already sick, of course, that they’d enjoy living like that, but the stupidity cake’s icing is how totally wrong their base assumptions are from the start.

They all think they’d be Caesar, of course, general or gladiator, a boss-man to whom law didn’t apply. None of these greasy always-online baby-fascists would be of the one-one-hundredth-of-one-percent of that population with such gravitas and grift. They would be mathematically, to a man-child, lucky mopping up Nero’s Orgy Pits. The past was largely awful, the only ones who may have had it as good as middle-class Americans today were kings. And so few were kings.

This is not a gendered thing, not in the internet’s deepest sewers. Their distaff counterparts long to be “trad-wives” while they craft their incest slash-fics about the CW’s ‘Supernatural’ series in basements no different than the misogynists previously mentioned. They’ll gush over the idea of being some Tzarist princess, spoiled in furs, drowning in fine perfumes and Fabergé eggs. Their own mirror-image mistake, very few were princesses, most of these deluded confabulists would have died giving birth to their fifth kid at sixteen, after having plowed a potato field from dawn to dusk. History sucked for goddamned-near everyone.

Nostalgia’s a hell of a drug. It’s reasonable enough to have an affection for your own past, but madness pretending it was perfect, just because it was yours. Love your own memories, if you must, with honest opened-eyes but worshipping a trumped-up version of someone else’s blurry history only leaves you an easy mark for nihilistic monsters.

There may be some distant yester that was actually better, just out of the trees and caves, before Gilgamesh, before the systems of power that make living awful for anyone without a trust-fund, maybe. But in recorded history, there’s never been an era where you were better off as a working person than North America or Western Europe in the early Twenty-First Century. We’ve so much work to do, but at least we’re not pooping into tureens under our beds. In ways, we have it better right now than all those gladiators and queens those ignorant traditionalists wish that they were ever did. The past mostly sucked. We can create a future that’ll make now look like it sucks too, but we’re not accomplishing it pining to be royals in times long-dead. Eyes forward. Let’s make our future a better place instead.