I have dodged and weaved about the initial question posed in this series of blogs … are things worse now than they were when my generation came of age? In my heart, I know there is no way to answer such a question, at least not with any degree of fidelity. The answer lies hidden behind the penumbra of subjective impressions and assessments.

True, the quants in the crowd will insist that metrics can be explored to assess the relative goodness or happiness across time periods. They will look at economic activity, crime statistics, divorce rates, suicides, and so forth. But these are rough proxies at best for the underlying phenomenon of interest which, unfortunately, remains obtuse and elusive. Recently, in one of the endless lists of best this and that which pop up on my phone, there was one that presumably enumerated the best place to live in each state, using what they said were objective measures. Yeah, right! They had Green Bay as number one, just ahead of Madison in the Cheesehead State. Green Bay? Really! I know of no one who talks of moving to Packer City while MadTown is booming with population growth and often is listed in the top 3 places to live in the country, if not the best. Beware of people bearing numbers as if they had magical properties.

No, in the end, such a comparison remains a matter of personal judgment. In approaching the topic, I am loosely aware that research suggests that the dominant bias is to view the past with rose colored glasses. We tend to suppress or repress or just plain forget the hard and distasteful aspects of long ago in favor of the pleasent and uplifting. Perhaps that is why I recall so little of my childhood. Actually, not true. How could you forget that I wrote a whole book about my youthful indiscretions. Based on that literary gem, I could argue that one ONLY recalls the embarrassing and the painful.

I do have one more or less firm insight on the objectivity of recollections from one’s past life. My Peace Corps group (India-44) got together for the first time on the 40th anniversary of our return to the States in 1969. It was the first reunion I ever attended and found it to be a positive, emotional experience. The result of that gathering (and a couple of more such events), we decided to set down of our thoughts and recollections of India in an edited form and my later integrated retelling of our follies in a work titled Our Grand Adventure.

Throughout our struggles to recall our past service with any reliability, we continued to question our specific memories along with any summary feel for that portion of our lives. Based upon several discussions as we developed our written record on the sub-continent, I think it is safe to say the following. The experience was hard, very hard, but we felt that it immeasurably altered our lives for the better. We were pushed, yet those of us who remained to the bitter end, a minority of those starting out in 1966, were the better for experiencing this challenging part of our lives. At the same time, most of us felt we were hopeless screwups who were out of our depths. The survivors of India 44 were an extremely smart and talented group as a whole. Most accomplished amazing things in their lives. But throwing city kids just out of college, armed primarily with liberal arts degrees, into rural India to be agricultural specialists was not the best idea Peace Corps ever had. In fact, it might rank among the worst.

Eventually, though, we realized that we did have some real-time records of our experiences. We would not have to rely solely upon faulty memories. One volunteer kept detailed journals of his experiences which he diligently dug up to review. His entries included a descriptions of events in which many of us jointly participated. Others had letters written home that had been kept by family members.

Even I, not a journal keeper, came up a form of written record. I wrote a number of letters to my college girlfriend who looked increasingly wonderful to me as I experienced the loneliness of the Rajasthan desert, isolated and with no means of easy communication with the outside world. I even thought about, and surprisingly wrote about, the prospect of marriage … a shocking turn for an anti-commitment bloke like myself. Like I said, the place was challenging.

However, she was a bright young woman (she would get a Doctorate in a real science) who decided to marry a Post-Doc she met while working at Harvard. But we continued to communicate for the remainder of my tour. Why this story of romantic loss and my hapless love life? Well, she and I did reconnect by chance (through cyberspace) some 4 plus decades later. Once reconnected, we kept up a lively and continuous interaction through cyberspace though we never physically met. However, I found out that she kept everything I sent her as well as many memorabilia from our college romance. I won’t go into this in any detail but we figured out that we did love one another back in school. We were simply too dumb and naive to realize it. Oh well!

But here’s the thing, she sent me everything she had about US, including all my letters from India to her. These became the closest thing to a journal I would ever have and the best insights to who and what Tom Corbett was as a young man. Then again, I suppose I could have lived quite well without that knowledge. However, I did pour a lot into those missives, all my hopes and fears and angsts. I doubt I have ever expressed myself better, or with more authenticity, than in those letters.

So, what did we learn from these ancient recordings in real time? Mostly, that we were more successful than we recall, and that we had more positive experiences than we could capture from our flawed memories. I chatted about accomplishments and undertakings that I no longer remembered four decades later. So did our journal keeper. He was amazed at descritions of agriculture projects that he had absolutely forgotten about.

Oh, we all discussed our struggles. They were real enough. But they apparently were offset by positive events and experiences, things that we tended to lose for some reason. My best guess is that our hopes going in were overstated on the positive side and that relative to those high expectations, reality could not match up. Our bottom line, our overall gestalt drifted to the negative side in light of our overly optimistic expectations.

One funny incident will suffice. As we were leaving India, I was rooming with the journal keeper in Delhi as we were going through all the exit protocols. When he mentioned an eye problem, we prsssured him to mention this so that PC would take care of it. That evening, he returned from seeing an Indian eye specialist who told him he had a very serious problem but insisted that the Peace Corps doc would have to tell him what it was. After wandering about on his own contemplating his imminent demise, he returned to our room that evening distraught and depressed, only to find that I had locked him out. It turned out I was occupied with a young lady who obviously had dubious standards.

Now, my memory of the event is that I was a complete schmuck who was only concerned with his own carnal delights and erotic possibilities. Hey, I’m a guy! Apparently not, however, at least according to his journal. True enough, on his first try, I believe I picked him up and chucked him down the hotel corridor (he was small of stature). On a subsequent try to gain entry to our joint room (after he tried the room of his close PC friend who treated him as I did, and for the same reason), I finally took a moment to listened to his tale of woe.

Before going to the written record, you must believe me that I have no menory of doing the right thing … none whatsoever. However, according to his journal I immediately abandoned all efforts to seek a sexual nirvana and dived into making frantic calls to find out if he was going to die anytime soon. While I was so engaged, he chatted with my lady friend. Frankly, I am stunned by my display of altruism. I mean, really, you don’t get many chances at erotic bliss in India. But it says I was self-sacrificing in black and white. I did the right thing. After all this time, I am yet amazed at that.

He also wrote in his journal that his conversation with this attractive young lass made him even more depressed. Apparently, she went on about how sexy she thought I was (I still had that Kennedy Boston accent then). He wasn’t impressed with my romantic prowess since he believed he might be dying. You would think he would put my erotic needs above his own life. Really! In the end, though, I did the right thing and his problem turned out to be a detached retina, not life threatening but which did require a trip to a military base in Germany for repair (his best friend and I visited him there). Go figure!

One of the problems I have with a blog is that I start out with a point in mind and then let my mind, and fingers, wander. I never get to my main point … which is whether the present is better or worse than when we came of age in the post WWII era. Alas, that will wait at least one more blog. Sorry about that.

Let me leave you with this. Presumably, the dominant bias is to empahsize the positive and neglect the negative from long ago recollections. That being said, my own single experimental result (from PC memories compared to the few written records) suggests that we India -44 volunteers tended to emphasize negative memories and to discount positive ones. Don’t you hate contradictory evidence?

Hmm, I’ll have to noodle this a bit further and let you know what I decide.