There are people around the blogosphere who accuse conservatives, Republicans, Tea Partiers, or whatever names they choose to call us, of wanting to go back to the ‘50’s. For those who accuse us, the ‘50’s were a time of great upheaval in our society. They see it as a time where repression was making its last stand. Racial tension were brewing, women still had little choice in most aspects of their lives, and our country was just recovering from its last Great Depression, from endless wars, and untold want. Men, or what was left of our post War male population, were returning to their private lives and trying to put their body and souls back together after experiencing the horrors of Nazi and Japanese atrocities and a “conflict” in Korea. And Blacks and other minorities were still denied their rightful place to share in the opportunities of our great promise not yet 200 years old. That is what they remember and what they think we want to go back to.
But this is what I remember or was taught.
After years of deprivation from the Great Depression followed by more years of wartime rationing, sacrifice and fear, our nation and the world were ready once again to move forward. It was a time to come out of the fox holes, the bomb shelters and to take down the blackout curtains that had held in the fear and shut out the night sky for so many years. It was a time where we once again turned our factories, farms, mills, and all private industry away from “the War Effort” and into a collective operation for recovery, growth and collective prosperity. Our country has never seen such a massive push to live again after so many years of deprivation. Massive building projects brought our urban areas to life again. A nationwide network of roads were being built that made it easier and less expensive to bring goods from those factories, farms, and mills to all corners of the country and to once again provide for a nation ready to partake after years of selfless sacrifice. Jobs were plentiful and we had a workforce that was ready, willing and able.
Community by community, we became productive again and the birth of the “suburb” began to thrive and flourish. Safe, clean, well-built private family homes were springing up all over for an every growing prosperous middle class. Trains were humming along tracks filled with goods and workers that for so long had carried soldiers and sailors away to far off places and possibly to their heroic doom. Automobiles were affordable and ready to fill the ever- expanding network of roads being built. And we were just at the dawn of a new age of luxury air travel across the world and possibly beyond our own planet. But, most of all, our maternity wards were overflowing once again with our greatest post-War effort – lots and lots of babies. The baby boom had begun.
It was also a time, probably our last time where we still believed that our children were our greatest treasure to be protected from harm and the horrors of the outside world that could be so ugly. We protected them from the images that children should never see or know about until they were old enough to understand them. We wanted our children to be children. We wanted them to play on their new shiny bikes and in the new ball fields, to be clothed in new clothes that no one had worn before, and to come home to a table full of plenty to eat and warm beds at the end of the day. We wanted them to learn in good schools and get good jobs, and to have the room to dream big dreams. In return, we demanded excellence and obedience to a society where the adults were in charge. We gave them a child size world where we allowed our children to succeed or fail in the little child-size things. And with guidance and security from the adult world, our children could grow into their own adult-size world better able to navigate adult-size successes and failures. We lived in a world where “Father knows best” and where mistakes were not lethal or permanent, but learning experiences to build character. Most of all, we wanted our children to grow up to be happy, productive citizens who would love their neighbors as themselves, when they would see need they would endeavor to assuage it, and who would love their country and their God with all their heart and all their soul. That is what we wanted as parents, as a society, and as dreamers of big dreams.
For some us, these ‘50’s adults are our parents and grandparent. They grew up as children in times of great want and chose great sacrifice, sometimes travelling great distances, in the hope that their children and grandchildren would never have to experience the same. Because what we did not know could not harm us. They worked hard and continued to sacrifice, so that our dreams could be realized. They did it collectively and as a community. And they succeeded.
We don’t do that anymore.
I could expound as to the “hows and whys” of it, but like everything else in our giant echo chamber of a society, we all have our own opinions, but no strength for solutions. So I will not offer any. But of this I hope we can all agree. As a society, we no longer see the value in protecting our children from the horrors of an ugly world. We no longer see the value in protecting that child-size world in which our children can learn their child-size character-building lessons. And because most of us live in a world without any real want or horror, entire industries have been spawned whose sole purpose is to manufacture these horrors and degradations so that our children can see the world as we think they should see it, and not as it should be imagined by a child. Then we feed this to our children as a steady diet for their ever- increasing appetites and then wring our hands and weep and wonder why the world is the way it is. Well, as my Depression-era, victory garden growing, self-sacrificing, God-fearing Grandmother would say - “Garbage in, garbage out”.
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