Out of the Past

My dad would have been 86 today.

He served in the 29th infantry in World War II, and he surely would have been in the first wave of the assault on D-Day had he not injured his knee in a jeep accident and required a medical stay. As it was, he went over after Normandy was secured and policed the area, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

I once asked him if he ever shot anybody, and he just kind of rolled his eyes and looked away and changed the subject. I believe his rank was sergeant, but I’m not sure. He later completed a master’s degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. before he became one of the co-founders of the Northeast Philadelphia Internal Revenue Service operations center. It remains then as now a sprawling facility, though I’m quite sure it has grown decrepit with age and will eventually be closed, with all of the personnel planned to move to a facility near 30th and Market Street in the city.

I’m not going to tell you some fairy tale. He had problems, but he was a good man. He smoked Tareyton cigarettes, drank Italian Swiss Colony (ugh) and used to staple together foam tiles for reuse in the drop ceiling of the basement of our home, along with threading wires into fuses for our electrical appliances (though he did many other handywork-related things). He was a provider in the typical fashion for men of his generation.

Part of the reason why I’m thinking of him now is that I am truly glad that he is no longer around to see what is happening to the working middle class that built this country after World War II and subsequent generations. Change was inevitable – we could barely afford The Great Society when it was taking place, and we certainly can’t now, and more fool those of the left who ridiculed it while the unholy alliance between the radical right wing Southerners and Westerners and the pro-business conservatives began to take shape – but the lessons of sacrifice during an earlier era were forgotten by many of the baby boom generation seeking to renounce their youthful indulgence.

The splintering of the Democratic Party into a gaggle of interest groups often competing with themselves to the point where they could not find a consistent, unified voice to summon the country to recall its past has been a tragic development also.

The occasional moments of unification (see Carter, Jimmy and Clinton, Bill) proved to be illusory, as the radical conservatives – ridiculing the Democrats for talking of “class warfare” while they themselves practiced it – found a means to pillage our savings and loan institutions in the 80s, relax corporate regulations at approximately that timeframe also, consolidate power among media outlets in the 90s for the purpose of controlling dissemination of information in the present day, and accelerate the elimination of white-collar professional jobs from 2000 through offshoring and outsourcing.

Also, as we know full well, the individuals running our plutocratic state are not satisfied with the ravages they have wrought to date. In a matter not unlike holding the sails and rigging in place while a ship is violently tossed in a storm at sea, we are fighting to hang onto Social Security, which is truly one of the last safety nets still in existence. Medicaid is in trouble, and thanks to “tort reform”, it is harder to bring class action lawsuits. It is also now harder to file for personal bankruptcy in the event of loss of income due to a catastrophic health care-related development for which insurance does not provide, among other reasons.

All of the safety nets that were provided for us were hard earned by the generation of my parents, and their squandering and neglect from individuals who buy into the jingoistic, aggrandizing half truths and lies of politicians of either party (though primarily the Republicans) without, apparently, the slightest clue about the history of this country over the last 50 or so years fuels my ire which enables me to populate this site with my words which, at times, are admittedly feeble for my purpose.

Despite it all, there is still more right with this country than not, though for my money, the scales are tipping the wrong way more and more every day. I can take some comfort, though, from the fact that this was not the legacy provided for me by the people who built the way of life from which I have benefited over all of these years.

They did their part. It’s time for more, many more of us, to start doing ours.