You may have heard of the concept of retrospective coronation — the idea of looking back, and well after the fact deciding that a moment or phenomenon was the key event in history, even though at the time there was no sign of its significance. In evolution, for instance, there’s this idea of “mitochondrial Eve,” that a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years ago there was one human woman walking around who was the ancestor of everyone living today. If we had a time machine and went back to that era, though, she’d be unrecognizable, no one special, and the only thing that actually distinguishes her is future events, many of them driven by chance. That’s the retrospective part, that such a person can only be recognized with hindsight.
I think I’ve found a complementary concept: retrospective invisibility. Or maybe it’s the same thing? It’s the idea that because we didn’t see something happening in the past, it isn’t real now or then. Here’s a perfect example:
Cool. Amazing. How true. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t know anyone who’d been diagnosed with autism. Not a one!
I did know lots of kids who couldn’t concentrate, or who were weird, or could never get their homework done on time, but we just called them stupid and let ’em fall through the cracks.
I didn’t know any kids with life-threatening allergies, but that was because it was their own look-out. You couldn’t expect other kids to worry about whether a peanut could kill another kid; that was their problem. I imagine there were quite a few parents who were quietly desperate about keeping their kid’s failed biology quiet while trying to insulate them from a dangerous world.
I did know kids who had chronic illnesses that kept them out of school all the time. I don’t know what the heck was wrong with them. They were just weak, I guess.
I did get exposed to some of the secret stuff, though. My grandfather was a custodian at a ‘special school,’ and I sometimes helped him out. I met a few of my peers there, kids I’d grown up with until suddenly, they disappeared. If a kid had behavioral problems, or if a young girl got pregnant, whoosh, they were whisked off to Thomas School, and all the mainstream kids could forget about them.
A few times, I talked to a girl my age there. I liked her. She’d gotten pregnant — a bad influence, so they disappeared her. They later took the child away. She stayed in the “special school,” where she suffered from depression, another of those things that didn’t exist in the 1970s for teenagers.
There was also another “special school” on the other side of town, a Catholic school for boys where all the troublemakers were sent. It had a terrible reputation. But on the bright side, all the kids who were bouncing off walls were kept there, so we could pretend they didn’t exist!
Another tremendous bonus: now people of that era can look back on their youth and proudly brag about how wonderful those days were, without a single cloud in the sky. We clearly need to bring back special schools for bad kids and juvenile halls and good ol’ sanatoriums where we can lock away our troubled youth and forget they exist. Workhouses and prisons! The wave of the future!