Part III
If there was some time you could go back to, what would it be?
My friends and I sometimes kicked this question around, before we had families and on occasion after that event. It’s been a long time since any of those occasions. I suppose that gradually our attentions were simply captured by all those things before us, while the clock went around and around and we tried to keep up with it or pace ourselves to it for its long run.
But. One point of those conversations that recurred was, we’d like to have modern medicine with us, wherever we landed. The young are supposed to be callow and shallow but at least in some respects, such as this, we weren’t—probably you weren’t either: We recognized that modern medicine saved us a lot of suffering and a lot of grief. In another time, given any half-dozen of us, at least one would have been missing; that is, someone wouldn’t have made it to twenty years of age. Before my father was ten years old, two younger brothers died. Before my mother was ten, her mother died, and an older sister became the woman of the house at about the age of sixteen.
Further, as I posted in “Daddy”, my father’s father died at an early age, like a lot of miners. There was a surplus of widows around town, and shortage of grandfathers. On our always-busy main street, I remember a number of individuals I learned not to look at: a man without legs selling pencils from a tin cup, pushing himself along on a small wheeled dolly. Certain men who always seemed to be occupying benches, always wearing long overcoats and old-fashioned caps; a man we’d now call mentally challenged who had worn a furrow on the right side of his mouth from always going about with his tongue thrust out and to that side. I say I was taught not to look at them because it was rude for a boy to do that; maybe what I learned amounted to not-seeing.
I myself never missed a meal growing up—thank you once again Mom and Dad— and I didn’t witness dire, general poverty. There were several reasons for this.
First and foremost I was living in the United States of America as it emerged as a global superpower, with the world’s largest economy.
Second, working people were getting a fair share of all that.
Third, organized labor played a large part in number two. In my town The United Mine Workers of America was the largest and strongest organization but in the many textile mills around the region, we had the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Fourth, I came of age at the fruition of democracy itself. One after another, the leaders of the country adopted policies to benefit as many as possible (blacks were still largely excluded). Laws of the era permitted the growth of organized labor. Further, programs of direct assistance were instituted. Welfare, if you will. I include Social Security.
In the Baby Boom generation, vast changes came to the human experience in my country. In addition to the continued growth of a regulatory government, social welfare, and organized labor, there was:
- migration from farm to town. In from 1950 to 2010 the population living in rural areas remained near 60 million, while urban populations increased from about 89 to 249 million. http://demographicchartbook.com/index.php/chapter-2-urban-rural-and-farm-population-and-large-cities/2-1-population-by-urban-rural-and-farm-residence-for-the-united-states-1790-to-2010/
- The number of farms plummeted; individual farms grew larger.
- abandonment of cultivation along the Appalachian chain, and its reforestation
- enormous economic expansion
- expansion of air travel
- people used to look up when an airplane flew over them
- exploration of space
- first the computer, then the personal computer, then mobile phones, and…the internet
- increase of civil rights
- general increase of personal liberties
- general changes of dress and manners
- men don’t wear hats
- jeans are worn almost everywhere
- flip-flops too
- people have almost dropped the use of “Mister,” “Missus,” and so on. Even next-door neighbors were given this distance, until a certain barrier was overcome.
- in some parts of the country, people can live next to each other for years, without ever becoming acquainted
- first names, or even more informal forms such as “Jimmy Carter,” “Bill Clinton,” are used by everyone, beginning with first meeting
Maybe it’s a general loosening that annoys people. Maybe, people think of the past as a time more polite, where people helped each other more. Can’t we go back to that?
No. Well, maybe some alliance will manage to put pornography put behind closed doors again; that’s possible. I doubt though that we’ll ever see calm “speech” on the web again, the kind that treats a receiving party as another child of God. One of the first phenomena that followed the appearance of the web was “flaming”, which was a perceived license to be a jerk, and the situation raced to lower and lower bottoms.
We can’t go back to being a nation of small farmers. It wasn’t all that good for everybody, anyway: hunger stalked many, such hunger that it could drive people to do things that would shame them the rest of their lives. It’s small wonder we heard so little of it. A high proportion of all those land-grant farms of the 1800’s soon failed. See Wisconsin Death Trip. See The Octopus. See The Grapes of Wrath.
Well, yes, we might say; you can always find a dark side to anything if you’re the kind that looks for darkness. You have to look at the bright side. I agree. I tend to feel… well, awful, about life, and looking at the bright side—that is, having hope—alone can combat the overpowering weight. When I learned that I understood why Hope, along with Faith and Charity (which can also mean Love), are called the Three Theological Virtues.
You can find the dark side in anything having to do with humans, because it’s there. It’s the other side of the coin; life is complicated; there’s no perfect approach to anything. (Let’s not even talk about making people happy.) Those who don’t want to look at or even know about unpleasant lives, lack a bit of Charity. Just as it’s impossible to make folks happy, it’s impossible to look at a problem from every angle. Keeping in mind that there are other dimensions, and that there are things we don’t know, would be stronger.
***
I want to circle back to the point about changes in a lifetime—with the next installment.
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