“It just was a different time.”
God, that phrase has always irritated me.
I’ve been interested in history for a long time. I’ve heard that sentence a lot. Our founding fathers owned slaves; it was a different time. Women were considered the property of their husbands or fathers; it was a different time. The Reagan Administration’s “unofficial” policy was that AIDS was a divine punishment for homosexuality; it was a different time.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Olivia Loudon is one of two inaugural recipients of the Erinda Sheno Memorial Prize, a writing contest open to high school and college students. This week, Vote That Jawn, in partnership with Kelly Writers’ House and The Citizen, announced the winners; you can read the winning high school essay here.
I understand why people use that phrase. Most of the time, there’s not a malicious intent behind it. It’s a way that people attempt to acknowledge injustices, while attempting to understand the historical context that they existed in. It’s also a statement that history won’t repeat itself, because we now know that what happened was wrong. Things were bad, now they’re better.
Stop brushing off the past as a “different time,” and understand that it is still deeply affecting the world today.
But this creates a sort of a false separation between the past and the present. When we think of history we often think of things that happened decades ago, if not centuries. We consider it to be something completely separate from us, but that’s not true. Yesterday is technically history, the same way that tomorrow is technically the future. We may be different people in a different time from our ancestors, but the actions our ancestors took, the circumstances they dealt with, all added up to place us where we are now. Just as we are capable of recognizing injustice done to us, so were they.
The thing that really irritates me about that phrase “it was a different time” is how dismissive it is. Laws like the Comstock Act or slavery were a statement against your humanity. They gave others permission to mistreat you or even attack you, on the grounds that you weren’t fully human. It was a different time in the sense that we can’t go back and save them.
Sally Hemmings spent her life in chains and was abused by Thomas Jefferson, a man almost four times her age. She has as much of a right to have her story told as he does. Don’t we at least owe that to her? To everyone like her? If we brush aside what happened to them because it “was a different time,” it doesn’t fix anything. It’s still the same type of injustice they faced in their lives, and it prevents us from seeing those patterns when they repeat themselves in the modern day.
Yes, there was a “different time” in this country when desegregation, women’s suffrage, and same sex marriage were seen as dangerously radical and unpopular ideas. There was even a time when the United States as an independent country from Britain was seen as a radical idea, but hundreds of years on, it seems ridiculous that our right to self-determination was even up for debate. These ideas are about fighting for a more just future that you might not live to see. Eventually, hopefully, these ideas of a better kinder world aren’t radical at all any more. They’re not asked for, they’re expected.
It is a different time, here and now. We owe it to ourselves, our communities, and our future generations to keep fighting for our rights to fair pay, free elections, civil rights, and bodily autonomy.
So I want to introduce a new use of the phrase, “it was a different time.” It is a different time, here and now. We owe it to ourselves, our communities, and our future generations to keep fighting for our rights to fair pay, free elections, civil rights and bodily autonomy. It is a different time, so we have no right to ignore the tragedies of the past and deny victims posthumous justice and recognition. It is a different time, and we have the duty and the ability to tell the stories of all past Americans, even when it exposes ugly truths we’d like to avoid thinking about.
It is a different time, where the power should lie in the hands of the people and not with a small group of billionaires. Then, when we’re long gone, our descendants can use the phrase “it was a different time” about us: “It was a different time when things were harder for a lot of people, because of who they were or who they loved or where they came from, but then they leaned on each other until they created what we have now.”
Erinda Sheno believed that now was a different time, and that’s why she has such a powerful legacy for someone so young. We have a vital opportunity to learn from our elders who fought for gay rights, workers rights, civil rights and feminism, rights that we might not even think about in our daily lives. But we can only do that if we stop brushing off the past as a “different time” and understand that it is still deeply affecting the world today.
Let’s make now a different time.
Olivia Loudon will be graduating from Bryn Mawr College in May. She is the college student winner of the Erinda Sheno Memorial Prize.
Last August, The Citizen was devastated to learn of the passing of Erinda Sheno, a former Citizen intern and passionate young writer. The daughter of loving Albanian immigrants, Sheno attended Benjamin Rush High School and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an active member of the writing community and of Vote That Jawn, the youth-led movement to encourage voting and civic engagement. In Sheno’s memory, the Vote That Jawn team, led by Penn professor Lorene Cary and Carson Eckhard, established the Sheno Prizes in Erinda’s memory. The annual prize goes to a Philadelphia-area high school or college student for an essay about voting, democracy, immigration or Philadelphia life — issues dear to Erinda Sheno.
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