Lately we hear a lot of 'Make America Great
Again' chants, but just what do people mean by those feelings and chants? I am sure the 'America Was Great' comment depends a lot on who you ask. Are they longing for a time of true greatness in this country, or are they simply feeling nostalgia that their memories of youth bring? I hardly think anyone in America can honestly say that this country is not in trouble. So looking back at how America has been, is worth the effort.
Sometimes I even catch myself being nostalgic, thinking of the times I grew up in. But we cannot relive the past, as much as we would like to. I grew up in an era when the small town I grew up in, had plenty of jobs. My father went to work every day, my brothers went to work each day and even as a teenager, we had a choice of jobs to earn some spending money. My parents were poor, we were poor, but as a kid I had love, a roof over my head and food on the table, so I never noticed so much just how poor we were. We pumped water from a well, we had electricity (this house was the first house my parents lived in that had electricity) but we had no running water and we used an outhouse. Kids these days would think they were dying if they had to do any of those things. We lived on five acres and my dad, who always wanted to be a farmer, loved planting, so we had plenty of food. My mom preserved anything she could get her hands on, that was food. There were so many jobs that I worked several summers to buy my class ring and school clothes in high school, so my parents didn't have to scrape for the money for those frills. I worked at an ice cream place one summer, serving cones and sodas to other kids who had money to spend. I worked in agriculture, picking grapes, I worked at a dry cleaner's pressing clothes using one of those large steam pressers. Hell, I even have a copy of American Graffiti that I love to watch, reminding me of a time I loved. A time when even kids could afford a car, afford gasoline to be able to cruise around with our friends on a Friday or Saturday night. Cars that were not these plastic Tupperware death traps made of plastic. Cars made of real metals and every guy could be a backyard mechanic, not having to use a damned computer to see what the engine needed to make it run. So, yes, I too can be quite nostalgic once in a while.
When I was a teenager and young adult, America got involved in that quagmire we called The Vietnam War. I cannot look back without admitting that was not a great, nostalgic time, not really. My friends and I were pissed off that our government had the power to abolish slavery, only to revive it again in the form of a draft. Forcing too many of my generation to fight a war we did not agree with. The only thing anyone might be able to find on a positive not about that war and the previous wars, was they did create jobs. Unlike today when war has been privatized and only a very few companies profit from it.
Today companies and state governments ( because the lobbyists pay our government) to destroy unions have destroyed most of them. At least our fathers and grandfathers had common sense. Sense in the form of knowing large companies would never ever give the workers any rights out of the goodness of their hearts, anymore than slave owners gave slaves they owned, any rights. Those rights had to be fought for. I have seen an entire generation (lacking common sense) destroy those very unions that help us live a better life. They have simply handed over their power, as workers, to heartless corporations without blinking an eye.
This is a generation that has embraced technology. Why? Why do so many love their gadgets? Well technology does have the ability to make life easier. It's a two edged sword. While making life easier ( and making us fatter and physically lazier) it also has the ability of robbing us of the jobs we need to support ourselves and our families. Technology, in small doses, makes life nice, but unfortunately we have saturated the entire planet with it. Technology, when used for good, helps us. We saw in this past Presidential election, it also can be inherently evil. Now it has run so rampant we don't know how to curb it. I walk into a grocery store and find they have replaced the clerks with self-checkouts. 'Self-checkouts' what a nice surgically sterile name for 'we have destroyed peoples' jobs). Now I'm supposed to check out my own purchases, which technically makes me destroy a clerk's job, technically making me an employee without the benefit of a paycheck. No thanks. While loving our gadgets, we have successfully destroyed our jobs too. We have done it to ourselves. So no longer do our fathers, brothers and sisters even have jobs to go to every day.
