Lots of judgments are kneejerk. Made in the moment by people lacking humility and perspective. With impulsivity and irreverence. But you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s why it’s a good thing to reassess everything years later, when the stakes are embarrassingly low and nearly everyone around you has forgotten what they were so angry about.
A reappraisal is meant for panned movies, woebegone cultural figures, geopolitical quagmires and even undercooked shellfish from an establishment specializing in fine dining (restaurant).
Many first noticed this during the heady days of George W. Bush’s bathtub oil paintings. Portraits of the former president floating rubber canards through bubbles. People started to say, “he wasn’t so bad.” It’s happened with television shows once derided as proof of society’s rapid decay. But when you see former stars of Jersey Shore now, many look at them like old friends. Whenever anything is considered vacuous in the present, a good defense is that it was far ahead of its time, misunderstood by critics who couldn’t quite grasp the scope of such an incandescent cultural phenomenon.
Because time truly heals everything. If not heals, then it obscures the truth to such a degree that you can’t help but look back and smile. What’s bad now is good soon and what’s good now is better later. Everyone wins when no one loses.
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