What I Miss About America

I miss America and I don’t think we’ll ever get that America back.

The America that I grew up in was at peace. We had just won a great war against vicious enemies. We were apprehensive but at peace. We didn’t invade other countries.

The America that I grew up in was prosperous. 90% of the people received 90% of the income and held 90% of the wealth. Any American who wanted a job could get one that paid a decent wage.

The America that I grew up in was hopeful and positive. We weren’t perfect but we were improving.

Not everything was sunshine and lollipops. Racism and segregation were real, serious, devastating problems, particularly in the American South. Little girls were prevented from going to school because of the color of their skin. But there were also presidents who sent the National Guard to protect them.

I don’t want the America of 70 years ago, with all its problems, back. I want the America I expected and that we could have been back. One in which all of us could get a fair shake and weren’t divided into contending camps at daggers drawn.

30 comments… add one
  • michael reynolds Link

    I’m afraid that’s not how I remember the country.

    I remember living in the panhandle of Florida and seeing segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms at the drive-in. I remember that my mother would tutor black kids from the segregated high school, and that we were warned by the KKK to stop, so we had to move closer to the base for safety.

    I remember my father doing two tours in Vietnam. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in short order. Race riots. Anti-war demonstrations. The illegal invasions of Laos and Cambodia, which set off the worst genocide since the Holocaust. Armored personnel carriers in the streets of burning American cities. Chicago 1968. Kent State, 1969, with National Guardsmen shooting defenseless American students and leaving them bleeding out on the campus quad.

    I remember the draft. I remember after his second tour my father, a career soldier, telling me he would personally drive me to Canada if my number came up because he knew intimately what that war was about.

    I remember working in restaurants and knowing that we never, ever hired a black person or Hispanic to work the front of the house where the money was made, they were always in the kitchen. I remember women, including my wife, being treated as less than fully human, as nothing more than tits and ass in hiring. I remember being threatened in the street for having long hair. I’ve been held up at gunpoint. My wife was pistol-whipped during a failed rape attempt.

    I remember Watergate, and that the president of the United States conspired in burglary, and the cover-up, and was running the ‘plumbers’ out of the White House.

    I don’t want the past, that’s what worries me about now, it’s the Nixon era but instead of a well-educated, smart, thuggish, devious but entirely amoral president, we have an ignorant, stupid, thuggish, repulsive and entirely amoral president. Nixon minus 30 IQ points. Nixon minus the entire contents of his practical education. An even more trollish, even less charming, even creepier version of Nixon, and I didn’t think that was possible.

    This country has gotten a lot better since I was a kid in the 50’s and 60’s and a young adult in the 70’s. That’s why it’s so depressing to see what we became on November 8, 2016.

  • You’re younger than I and you spent much of your childhood in the South. I visited the South, briefly on family vacations. I thought it was horrifying, frightening.

    St. Louis was the first major city in the country with a fully integrated school system—nearly a century ago. In my family racism was among the worst sins you could commit. My mom spent most of her career teaching black kids. We had family friends of all races and religions.

    My childhood was before Viet Nam, before Kennedy’s assassination, before race riots, before Nixon. The gallery of horrors you catalogue are what I’m complaining about, not what I miss.

    And I miss hope and optimism. Do you really believe we’re more hopeful and optimistic now? I don’t.

    I think we’re warehousing black kids in inner cities without hope. It’s a wonder the crime and homicide rates aren’t higher.

  • Also, Michael, could you explain to me how you reconcile your views? On the one hand you’re Panglossian; on the other you’ve frequently asserted that “we’ve lost the plot”. The way I would say that is we’ve gone astray, which is what I say in this post.

    Nearly every major city in the U. S. with a 25% or greater black population is experiencing its highest rate per 100,000 population of homicides ever. Not just Chicago but St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Houston, etc. St. Louis is in Rio territory. New York is an exception to that.

    That’s broadly characterized by the news media as “no crime wave”, I believe largely because they’re concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, and DC although they may have other reasons for their willful blindness.

  • michael reynolds Link

    No, I agree, we are no longer an optimistic country. We have lost the thread nationally. I’ve been whining about it for years. There is no narrative thrust. We aren’t going anywhere, and that’s part of why we are now going into reverse.

    The real revolution is technological. We are unplugging from the material world in many ways, moving into an environment which in virtual terms extends beyond physical location. A kid sitting in Chicago plays video games with people in Korea and Italy, that is an important phenomenon. That is the demotion of the importance of physical space.

    Since the 50’s the timing of the country was set in large part by the TV schedule – Lawrence Welk or All In The Family on this day at that time, be there or it was gone. There are no time-signatures now, no set meal times, less attendance at religious ceremonies, flexible work hours. At the macro level the same thing – we don’t seem to be moving with any regularity through the stages of life. When does childhood end now? Is there even a line between adult and child, between junior and senior? We’re rowing this galley but there’s no drummer keeping time.

  • When does childhood end now? Is there even a line between adult and child, between junior and senior? We’re rowing this galley but there’s no drummer keeping time.

    Despite the extended childhood, mentioned, I believe, in an earlier thread by Zachriel, neither adulthood nor life itself are being prolonged at nearly the same rate. I see an inevitable problem there. Maybe it will only become prominent when Mommy and Daddy die.

    Like you I’ve been an adult for a very long time. I filed my first 1040 at age 14. I’ve been self-supporting since my teens, giving money to and backstopping my mom rather than the other way around. I put myself through college and grad school, working multiple part-time jobs for something between 30 and 40 hours a week while going to school full-time.

    Since the 50’s the timing of the country was set in large part by the TV schedule

    I believe you but I have a hard time identifying with that. I literally cannot remember a time when my family did not have a television set (my dad was an early adopter). But I didn’t watch much TV until after grad school.

  • michael reynolds Link

    could you explain to me how you reconcile your views? On the one hand you’re Panglossian; on the other you’ve frequently asserted that “we’ve lost the plot”.

    I would quibble with that characterization. I am generally optimistic because in very important ways this country is far better than it was when I was a kid or young adult, and even a cursory knowledge of history suggests that we are not exactly in the worst of all possible worlds. But you know how I write? I don’t plan stories, I improv my way through 500 page books and 3000 page series. So noting that we’ve lost the plot does not imply to me that it has to stay lost – I lose the plot on a daily basis, and then I find it again.

  • Ah. I see processes as much more path dependent than that.

    I’m positive in my daily life but not optimistic. My views are much along the lines of what Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein:

    Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.

    Optimism is hard to maintain when you’ve had serious chronic pain for twenty years. I can’t even drink. It makes me feel that much worse afterwards.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    I’m fairly certain that Philly’s murder rate has dropped.

    From this:

    The 2016 homicide total, meanwhile, was 273, according to the UCR numbers; the department on its website reported 277. A police spokesman said the discrepancy was due to differences in how the department and UCR categorize certain cases.

    Still, either figure was slightly lower than the 280 homicides recorded in 2015. The last time the city topped 300 homicides was 2012, when there were 331, according to police statistics. The record high in recent history was in 1990, when the city saw 500 homicides amid an epidemic of crack cocaine.

  • Andy Link

    “I’m positive in my daily life but not optimistic.”

    That is my view as well. I’m not worried to much about me personally, but the future my kids will face. They are not at all like me in terms of their experience growing up and I worry that they won’t be properly prepared for adulthood. Like most parents, I’m muddling through and hoping for the best, but sometimes I think I need to be more like Sarah Conner with her son after the first Terminator failed.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    I would also say that a sign of racial progress in America would be the resistance to the simplistic idea of there being a crime wave causing carnage in our cities. I’m white and Trump’s rhetoric sounds racist to me. It sounds racist to my mom too, and she was mugged last year and is pretty nervous about crime.

  • michael reynolds Link

    I’d be considerably less optimistic if I couldn’t drink. And I have thus far been lucky with my health. On the other hand, I have two teenagers. Some day I’ll tell you about that barrel of fun. The old saw that a parent is never happier than their least happy child is absolutely true, which means you’re constantly walking across trap doors that might open at any moment. On the other hand you can’t tell your kids they’re going to be on The Road with Cormac McCarthy, so some optimism is required.

  • Murder rate per 100,000 population not raw number of murders.

    In the 2020 decennial enumeration I believe we’ll find that Philadelphia’s population has decreased (rather than increased as has been predicted) and, consequently, the homicide rate there per 100,000 will be seen to have been at levels not seen since the 1990s just as is the case in Chicago.

  • On the other hand, I have two teenagers. Some day I’ll tell you about that barrel of fun.

    I’ve had an earful. Each of my younger siblings has two children and they were all adolescents at the same time.

  • Gustopher Link

    So, you miss the brief period right after World War II, when we were the only functioning industrialized economy, and you were sheltered enough to only see pervasive racism on family vacations to the slave states?

    I don’t mean to belittle you — if I experienced that, I would miss it too.

    I would say that since that time, we have made massive strides as a country, while experiencing a simultaneous economic decline.

    We’ve dismantled Jim Crow (mostly), women can choose to have a career (often earning as much as men), people can marry whomever they want (race and gender!). We are also becoming conscious enough about race that even a lot of white people want to do something about it. Birth control is readily available. Abortion was briefly legal.

    We’re facing a backlash right now, but I am optimistic that if we are not all vaporized, we will keep on going in the direction of greater personal freedom and equality.

    Economically, however, I am far less optimistic. The war against unions has been successful, and will continue to be. Taxes have been cut so we would have to choose between “job killing taxes” and eviscerating the social safety net. Efficiencies of scale have eliminated a lot of jobs. Wages have fallen so the mere appearance of a middle class lifestyle now requires two incomes.

    I see no reason to think this decline will not continue.

    Militarily, the Pax Americana is coming to an end, and Trump is going to deliver us into a much more dangerous world. Mankind’s capacity for killing has steadily increased, but our restraint has not.

    We have guns everywhere in our society, and a pretty regular rate of lunatics getting their hands on them and shooting 12 people, or someone previously normal getting angry and killing their wife despite the consequences. As we get more efficient at killing, it’s only a matter of time before someone unbalanced or just angry will get their hands on WMD and use them.

    We’ve just given the nuclear football to a man who at the very least surrounds himself with people who believe in conspiracy theories (who knows what Trump himself believes), and does not have the self control to use a smart phone responsibly.

    And then there’s global warming.

    I see a world where people will be equal regardless of gender or color, free to marry who they want, mostly poor, and quickly vaporized.

  • Tell me about the neighborhood you grew up in, Gustopher. The street directly east of ours was entirely black—I lived in what was called a “changing neighborhood”. Sometimes I played with black kids. Some of my white neighbors were openly and obviously racist but my parents explained to us that was wrong and we shouldn’t imitate them.

    The woman who lived next to us ran numbers, a guy down the street from us sold drugs, and there was a brothel on the corner. The girls use to give me nickels to go get cigarettes for them. Was I sheltered? I guess so.

    The great difference between now and then is that there was hope then. We were moving in the right direction. There are other differences, of course. Most black kids then grew up with their married biological parents. That’s exceptional now.

    I think we’ve screwed up. I don’t think we’re moving in the right direction any more, at least not with respect to race. I think that we had the opportunity to bring black Americans into full participation in American society as equals and we’ve thrown it away.

    I’m not as happy about that as you seem to be.

  • Gustopher Link

    I grew up in a very white suburb in upstate New York, and moved to a black neighborhood in NYC when I went to college and learned a lot about people and about what I was taught when I was growing up. I was quietly taught to be racist as f.ck, and have mostly discarded that.

    I never saw integrated communities growing up — there were a couple of black kids that were bussed in for school and then bussed right out again.

    I’ve seen more mixed neighborhoods now than then. Even the town I grew up in has a smattering of black people living there now, with no great problems from the white folks now living side by side with black folks.

    I ugh the be wrong, but I don’t think you grew up in a typical household or in a typical location — you got a better and more integrated start than most people. I see progress where you don’t there.

    I do think that we have a problem with the black neighborhoods in some of our cities — racism compounds a lot of problems. More kids today of all races are growing up in broken homes, it hits the black neighborhoods harder, because they are already dealing with a lack of economic opportunities. Our drug laws have made felons of a large number of black men — taking them away from their families, and making them less employable in the future.

    I would even say that some neighborhoods have entered into a death spiral, where things are not getting better, and are not going to get better.

    But there are also some fine black neighborhoods. Even in Seattle, the whitest and most segregated city I have seen as an adult (ok, Portland is worse), the Central District is a little sketchy, and Columbia City is very nice.

    For those who aren’t in the death spiral neighborhoods, America is in general far more welcoming of blacks than it was in the 1970s, or the 1950s.

  • I ugh the be wrong, but I don’t think you grew up in a typical household or in a typical location

    I know and am thankful for how oddball my family is.

  • Guarneri Link

    Wow, after this thread if I still drank – given up perhaps for the same reason Dave did – I’d need a drink.

    I am struck by one thing throughout the thread. With the exception
    of Michaels wife, and I’m sure she doesn’t need, but has, my sympathies, we have examples of observation of strife, injustice and evil, but almost no first hand familiarity. Direct acquaintance with evil is of another kind.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Guarneri:

    have examples of observation of strife, injustice and evil, but almost no first hand familiarity.

    Um, right. Aside from being molested as a child; being threatened by the KKK; having a nine millimeter stuck in my face; having my uncle’s brother come very close to bleeding to death after attacking me; spending 11 days in two jails on a burglary beef and then teasing a man who’d murdered a woman and cut her fingers off; then getting dragged into a sad attempt at a jail break; and then jumping bail and living as a fugitive for 22 years; living under a freeway overpass in Austin; hearing my wife’s screams as she was pistol-whipped; stepping in to stop domestic batteries on a couple of occasions; and being on the wrong end of a rather thrilling chase through the dark streets of Crockett, California with Hell’s Angels behind me, you’re right: it’s been a strife-free life.

    See, what I know to be absolutely true is that the reason I had a chance to find true love, become a writer, go straight and have kids and mature into much less of an asshole than I used to be, is that I am white. 22 years I lived under fake names without ID and with two felony warrants. In that time I was hired a dozen or more times. I was given control over rent collection not once, but three times. I had keys to dozens of people’s homes and three large office/industrial plants where I could wander freely all night long. And in all that time, in a dozen jurisdictions, the sum total of what any cop ever said to me was, “Just go two blocks, you can’t miss it, sir.”

    The odds that I could have pulled off my life from where I started if I were black? Just about non-existent.

    So, actually, Drew, you’re the one with the narrow perspective and a failure of imagination and empathy. You can’t even get close to putting issues into perspective. Compared to me, dude? You’re a stress virgin. You’re just a college boy.

  • You’ve got me beat on hardship, Michael. Besides the childhood stuff mentioned above, I’ve been in jail (briefly; it wasn’t much—just the ordinary “stranger passing through small town” stuff), done a lot of street fighting and bar fighting, and got jumped by several guys outside a bar (I beat the snot out of them), been seriously injured in some accidents but that’s about it.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Dave:

    Well, honesty compels me to point out that good half or more were self-inflicted. I was not always the wise, thoughtful, humble guy you know me to be now.

  • steve Link

    Homicides are up, but overall crime has hardly changed. Most of the change in homicides is localized.

    http://time.com/4607059/murder-rate-increase-us-cities-2016/

    Been shot, stabbed a couple of times, but that was just at work and no major damage, we were poor and missed some meals, but never really felt hopeless like things would never change. Never had the wife or kids threatened, as that would really get to me.

    To the broader issue, I avoid living in the past. AFAICT, it had its good and bad parts, just like now. As to the future, I think it will be tougher for our kids. The US has real competition now on the economic front, not like it did in the post WWII years. Globalization is real. People with a high school or less education are now competing with workers in poor nations I don’t see anyway that they can make a lot more money than equivalent workers in poor nations.

    But beyond the economics, the separation of the country into separate camps is worrying. It has always been there, but modern media makes it much worse, and modern politicians are more adept at manipulating those differences.

    Steve

  • Jan Link

    There are innumerable examples of pain in life. What makes a life bearable and not seized by resentment and/or bitterness is how one carries their load forward. It either gives you strength and encouragement that you can take anything, or it breaks you and curdles your attitude towards everything.

  • Andy Link

    “I don’t want the America of 70 years ago, with all its problems, back. I want the America I expected and that we could have been back. One in which all of us could get a fair shake and weren’t divided into contending camps at daggers drawn.”

    Well I agree.

    Personally I don’t see any problem with acknowledging good things about the past that aren’t good now. I think it’s unfair to rebut such nostalgia by listing all the bad things and then wrongly assume there is some kind of tacit or explicit support for the crap side of history.

  • CStanley Link

    Didn’t have a chance to comment yesterday, but Dave’s post brought tears to my eyes. Andy’s final paragraph sums up my reaction to the comments. The idea that we can’t celebrate (and long for some sort of reestablishment of) the good Americana of that era because it was imperfect, is the cause of so much division and rancor.

    if you make a laundry list of problems, it’s as though the political parties have divided up the list, and rather than working on solutions they’ve taken the much easier approach of fostering discontent over the problems. All they have to do to gain or stay in power is convince the voters that the other party either doesn’t care about or actively tries to thwart reform on these issues.

  • Guarneri Link

    Well, I have to withdraw that in your case then, Michael. Although the balance of your commentary is in error and makes me wonder if you have gotten passed it.

    This “college boy” was serially raped by his father from approximately age 8-12 while his drug addled mother let it go and n and on to retain access to the scrip pad. There are other items. Charmed life, mine. That whole episode would be fodder for discussion, but not on a public website. And there is no need for the my dick is bigger stuff, it’s unwarranted, unhelpful and unbecoming.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Guarneri:

    That is genuinely horrifying. I withdraw the last bit of my rant and apologize.

    But if you don’t want to engage in dick measuring, don’t challenge people to prove they’ve got relevant personal experience.

    I can see where your experience would lead you to a political stance devoid of empathy. But it’s a mistake. Not as big a mistake as turning into a criminal, but still, in the end, a mistake. Empathy isn’t a weakness it’s a useful tool for understanding. You cannot in the end take in a useful sampling of data if you a priori exclude anything that makes you feel vulnerable, or that challenges your assumptions. It leads you to take truly stupid positions, such as your constant dismissal of racism or misogyny as central features of American politics. It’s an intellectual dead end, which is why no one pays much attention to your opinions. It’s too obvious to even a casual observer that you have disconnected from what is the bulk of human experience.

    I did something similar at age 16. I started reading Nietzsche and of course misinterpreting it. I joined the cult of logic, rejecting emotion, rejecting guilt or pity, embracing the little psychopath that lies inside most teenaged boys. But I was lucky and had a reckoning fairly early. By age 24 I knew I was had made a mess. It took about a decade to dig my way back to humanity.

    Our individual traumas are not reasons to dismiss the pain of others. We’ve both had bad times. (And it doesn’t sound as if Steve was having a party). Lots of black people have also had bad times, just like you, just like me, and on top of that they have to deal with racism. And then, on top of that they have people like you pretending that racism doesn’t exist, denying what they know to be true. Let’s say you and I both have X amount of trauma. Let’s pick a random black man who has also had precisely X amount of trauma. Equal traumas all around, except that the black man also has a harder time getting an education and a job. No matter how you cut it, the black guy has X+1.

    That’s what the obnoxious social justice warriors call ‘white privilege.’ It’s the edge you and I have simply by virtue of our skin color. It does not diminish your X or mine to admit that we’d both have had a harder time if we were not white. It’s really not even arguable, it’s pretty obvious. So in denying the existence of racism in order to preserve your own sense of victimization you are passing your pain on to other people, becoming in some degree a victimizer. And that is what people like you and I must not do. Someone in the chain of abuse has to stand up and say it stops with me, this does not get spread to my wife, or my kids, or society in general. It is the moral obligation of the traumatized not to be just another domino. And when we fail to contain the poison and allow it to seep out (see: me in 1978-9) we have a moral obligation to make what amends we can.

  • Karl Lembke Link

    The America that I grew up in was prosperous. 90% of the people received 90% of the income and held 90% of the wealth.

    Um… That means an America where everyone had the exact same income as everyone else, and everyone controlled the exact same amount of wealth as everyone else. The last time this existed was before the first wave of humans crossed over from Asia.

    What is the secret of your longevity?

  • That’s not true. There can be a distribution within the 90% that’s not precisely equal but still accounts for 90% of wealth and income.

    Income inequality in the United States has varied enormously over the past century. Right now we’re at a high water mark, much less equal than we were 50 years ago.

    In 1950 income inequality in the U. S. was just about the same as in New Zealand now.

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