Time to Rebuild

I’m starting to feel embarrassed about what I have that others don’t. I’m part of the crowd that just keeps getting richer while so many others are getting poorer. 

I’m not doing anything special to deserve that. 

In my working prime I made money and invested it. I sent my kids to public and private schools and took advantage of good healthcare plans. Now I’m riding a wave of passive capital appreciation at historically low tax rates.

I make charitable contributions, but they don’t even make a dent in the problem.

The problem, of course, is systemic inequality. Inequality in income and opportunity. Inequality in buffers for unexpected job loss or bad health. So much inequality, covering every aspect of life. 

It’s not just a few people who don’t have enough to live on, who can’t afford to go to a doctor, who can’t see that their children get good educations. It’s most.

American society today is as stratified as it has been since WW II. After the Robber Barrons, after the Depression, we made progress. Now we’re slipping back into a new Gilded Age. Our stark class differences would seem familiar to Charles Dickens and Marie Antoinette. Indeed, scenes from the barricades have been playing out these these last few nights in fiery protests in so many cities.

I'm ashamed of how we have abandoned so many of our citizens. I want to aid them through an institution that I no longer trust: the United States government. Only government—federal, state and local—can put in place the health, education and economic infrastructure to support its citizens more equally.

Not this national government, though. Our federal government needs to be rebuilt with wise, trustworthy people who care about others. Then it needs to collect sufficient taxes from me and others who are well off and use that income to support those who are less well off.

It’s that simple, really. As simple as pulling a lever in a voting booth this fall.

Those Who Made My World

May 8 is VE Day, the day in 1945 when the war in Europe was won. I was born six weeks later. I was two weeks old when America incinerated Hiroshima and then Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Three weeks after that, Japan surrendered. So I was born in the middle of the end of the last world war.

I only knew about it from a few family stories and history books. We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and righted the global economy at Breton Woods. I grew up in the sweet suburbs of those victories and the prosperity they ushered in. 

I knew about the Korean War, because my parents told me about their friends who died there. I knew about the Red Scare. I ducked and covered under my desk in grade-school nuclear drills. I didn’t like the war in Viet Nam, but I had been raised on the need to fight communism, and I wasn’t yet wise enough to recognize a far-away country’s internal struggles as being no threat to us and none of our business.

I grew up with American right and might. When we turned our national attention to our racial injustices, it seemed natural and proper that after fighting so many foreign wars to insure our freedom we would take steps to better secure that right for all our citizens.

I don’t idolize the men and women who built my world, but I respect them. I respect their ability to dig in and get the job done when called upon. They had a big bacchanal in the 20s, and a big economic hangover in the 30s, but they sobered up and rolled up their sleeves when it was obvious they had to. Yes, they didn’t do it until then. They didn’t want to get into another world war. Who could blame them? But when it came to them, they did not hesitate or stint. They cranked out bombers and tanks and they bought war bonds. They saved the world that became my world.

Now we are faced with another great war, this time against a deadly virus, both real and metaphorical. The real one is killing us. The metaphorical one is destroying who we are.

In response to the Coronavirus Pearl Harbor, our president has not roused our nation to common purpose and sacrifice, he has said it’s up to the states to tackle this enemy. It’s like saying some of them should make tanks, some fighter planes, some bombers, and they should figure it out and compete with one another for the materials to do their work. If Roosevelt had taken that approach, we’d all be speaking German. Or Japanese. Or, as Philip K. Dick imagined in The Man in the High Castle, both.

Roosevelt exhorted us to pull together. Trump incites us to attack one another. Roosevelt gave us Social Security. Trump is doing his best to kill off the Affordable Care Act.

Can you imagine Roosevelt addressing the nation the way Trump does? Can you imagine Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, the reporters we listened to and trusted to tell us the truth, on Fox News?

The men and women running our national government today are not making a world we want our children to inhabit. Are we going to do anything about it? Or are we going to continue basting in our provincial certitudes and hatreds until the world made for us with such purpose, strength and determination after World War II is gone?

When Dad Left and Didn't Come Back

I still remember when Dad abandoned us.

He was a salesman, and a good one, the kind who could sell ice to Eskimos. He would put on his suit and tie and go off to big sales meetings and come home with a big smile and a pocket full of money. This one time, though, he didn’t come back.

We lived in a big rambling house out in the country. There were a lot of us, siblings and cousins. When he left, it was just like always at first. Some of us went wild. Some of us stayed in our rooms. Most of us did a little of both. 

He called about the time he would normally come home and Alice talked to him. She told him we were running low on food. He said he was sure he had left the pantry stocked. We didn’t hear from him again.

At first we fought over everything, but when it became clear that Dad wasn’t coming back and there wasn’t enough to go around, some of the cousins said they were leaving. They thought they would be better off making their way on their own. The rest of us started dividing up what was left and trying to think up ways to get more.

We weren’t too successful. We borrowed from neighbors, but we were out in the country, and our neighbors were far away and didn’t know us well, and I don’t think they trusted us. We took turns going into town to try to do odd jobs for food, but there wasn’t much to do. We ended up stealing canned goods from the backs of shelves, so they wouldn’t be missed.

That was a tough time. We survived, all but Joey, who got a terrible fever and was gone before we could do anything. We buried him in the back yard as best we could.

We didn’t have a mother. I don’t think a mother would have left us. I say that because who saved us was a nice woman from social services. She said our dad wasn’t going to be our dad anymore. She got us some food and clothes and school books.

When we got old enough, we all moved away. I was the last one to leave. I haven’t been back to the old house since then. It’s probably falling down by now, with no one to care for it. That’s what happens when you abandon your home.