We’ve changed dramatically as a nation in just my own lifetime.
Which got me to thinking about how I might have contributed to the change myself.
I am conspiratorial enough to believe that indeed there are “change agents” in the shadows, who promote policies at a national level that appear to be minor in size and scope, but that lead to dramatic change.
Two examples I can think of immediately are taking religion out of schools, the morning prayer which was a classroom staple when I was young, as well as the pledge of allegiance. All of this came through court and government edict, and done at the macro, not the micro level.
And we can argue all you want about whether or not these small changes had anything to do the extreme decline witnessed in both our collective morality, as well as our patriotism. Both have seen a real decline in the nation that parallels the removal of a morning prayer, and pledge of allegiance to our flag. Personally I think there is a connection.
I feel the very same way about our respect for life. Except for election season when a politician wishes to pander, no one mentions Chicago and the weekend crime. It is a subject only during a debate when a politician needs to excite the Black vote in their favor and to shame White America for ignoring the plight of Blacks amongst us all.
I am certain, thought I haven’t “Googled”, that right now over this long Holiday weekend at least 40 people were shot in Chicago, with 8 dead, maybe more. Happens every week. America shrugs. And we can argue all you want but I firmly believe that the changing opinion on abortion has led to a more callous view on life itself. When discarding a baby is but a three hour detour to the clinic that barely disrupts your week, and absent all stigma, reverence for life itself becomes indifferent.
Certainly there were national efforts led by extreme activists on both of these developments, the removal of religion and the pledge from daily school activities, as well as the entire rise of the abortion movement.
Whether or not they had nefarious means, a desire to disconnect society at large from our patriotism, our religious connection, and our respect for life is an argument unto itself. But in each case these efforts had as a side effect a disconnect, they moved us toward a more secular society. I have no idea if that was some aim, or goal, all I know is that when I was born in the 1950’s we were certainly a religious nation and patriots all.
The numbers today say we’ve broken from organized religion, and you are more apt to read comments on Twitter, or see a mainstream news article about the many sins we’ve committed as a nation across the globe, as opposed to what a moral people we are. The daily drumbeat over our original sin of slavery is loud and ever-present.
Two subjects you can be assured that will be covered somewhere today, and everyday, in the mainstream media are our past sin of slavery that somehow informs every aspect of our daily lives today, and the alphabet soup movement, where gay, gay, gay is pounded into our brains every hour in mainstream “news”.
But back to myself, what did I do that changed the nation as I took the handoff from the greatest generation, and then in turn passed down behavior and tradition to the next generation?
How did I contribute?
The first thing that comes to mind is respect for work. Actual physical labor.
My dad, a WWII veteran who supported the family as a welder, could build anything with his hands. Anything. He worked a second job for a multi-millionaire in town who had a few different manufacturing plants, and a connected pair of sprawling farms in the country. There was no end to the demands from that job, from adding a club basement to the farm house, to putting a new roof onto the downtown warehouse building, to remodeling a kitchen. And dad was right there working a second job and doing it all. Electricity, plumbing, concrete work, I have no idea how he knew how to do any of that. He just “did it”. And it all worked. At fourteen they put me to work as a gopher, I think the hourly pay was $ 2.25, so I had a front row seat for it all. From the age of fourteen on you could find me on a roof in East Baltimore, even in July heat, patching and repairing, or giving the roof a new layer of tar. Or you could find me laying tile flooring, switching each tile side-to-side to form the correct pattern. Somewhere in Kingsville, Maryland is a floor where I messed up, laid two the same, and the pattern goes haywire in two directions. “Oh well”, said my dad looking at me. Feeling glum about my mistake, kneeling down there over the glued down tiles, “let’s hope that is where they put the bed”.
Dad could build anything, I was a complete and utter klutz who hated working with my hands, had absolutely no talent at all, and was probably a better bet to saw my own hand off before getting the two-by-four cut in half. And I mean I absolutely hated manual labor. Climbing a ladder, carrying loads of materials, hammering, nailing, all that was hard work and took a real effort. It was not for me.
So when it came time to raise my own children, I figured I was doing the right thing encouraging them toward a white collar career, where they could pay tradesman to do the heavy lifting. I thought this was the “right thing to do”, that it was helping move them all toward the upper crust. Pipe fitters didn’t live in the gated communities.
But my son said the other day he was disappointed that he lacked all skill in being able to do repairs around the house. Had no idea about how plumbing actually worked past “shit runs downhill”, or how to fix an electrical problem, no matter how small.
And that was my fault.
Because I know how to do all those things. I was taught about them from the time I was fourteen. I spent four years assisting on every kind of job you can imagine. But I passed none of that knowledge down to my children. On purpose. I thought I was doing the right thing, encouraging them to work with their minds and not their hands.
And I think my own attitude and efforts were mirrored by society. I think we all collectively raised children incapable of doing simple chores around the house. Maybe not down South, maybe not in pick-up truck land, where they still seem to understand how to put a deck onto the back of the house without calling a tradesman, or to put a bar in the basement, running plumbing, and electric.
But I am guilty for not passing on any of those skills that I was taught, and from what I can observe I wasn’t alone. Manual labor for most of my lifetime was stigmatized. The trades were for the poorer underclass, who didn’t choose college. Those that chose college could hire those who did not. That was the prevailing attitude. Leading to an entire generation that has no ability to fix a simple toilet tank problem. Everyone calls “Angi”.
I feel as if I handicapped the next generation.
In 1970 I was driving in a work truck at six AM, drinking awful coffee, and heading out to climb onto a roof, or grab a mallet and take down a wall. I don’t think any of my children have ever even swung a hammer.
And I am guilty of conspiring with the rest of America in disconnecting a generation from organized religion. As a child we were a devout Catholic family. Mom was President of the sodality, we were all altar boys all three sons, and I was a lector in church, doing the readings at mass twice a weekend in 7TH, and 8TH grade. I went to Catholic schooling for sixteen years. That might indicate I graduated college but I didn't. I did two tours of fourth grade as a complete and utter ADHD headed buzz bomb. Went onto a Catholic prep school, and a Jesuit college. So I was drilled hard in religion and religious principles all my young life.
when it came time to raise my own children, we decided not to attend church. I’d burned out on it, the pedophile scandal gave me nothing but a feeling of disgust for the institution. I saw the hypocrisy up front, behind the scenes. Priests who took a vow of poverty but who were as materialistic as any man. Who enjoyed the power of the vestments, bullies in fine garments.
We sent the children to “Catholic lite” schools, Episcopal schools, where they got a daily dose of religion but never at the level of my own indoctrination.
And so as family behavior goes my parents generation were devout. They attended mass each week, considered it a mortal sin to miss a mass. Some days, for whatever reason, dad would go to an early morning mass mid-week. Why, I’ll never know. Money as always tight, maybe just to keep the family fed we needed some extra prayers.
And I was forced to go to church every week, and be an altar boy. Be devout. Yet look how I raised my own children. We never went to mass, ever. Weekends were wide open for fun and enjoyment. I did teach them some sense of civic duty. But I didn’t imbue them with the deep faith that I was raised in.
Does that mean that some of the message was lost? In two generations, did I remove some sense of morality due to separating my own from organized religion? Did I contribute to our decline in societal values by removing my own from the influence of church?
And if I did, wasn’t I right in step with America at large, who stopped going to church in large numbers, and who disconnected from organized religion right along side me?
Another way I changed what was “passed down” from generation to generation, in generations passed, had to do with money. I can honestly say I didn’t give my children any education at all about money. How to open a savings account, maintain a checking account, how paying interest robbed you of your hard earnings, how a “penny saved is a penny earned”. I never taught them anything about delayed gratification, or how credit cards worked. I didn’t give them any education at all about the stock market, how you can invest your money and have it work for you.
I was keenly aware about money from an early age because we didn’t have any. As the youngest of six in a struggling lower middle class family I knew want. When I reached for an added helping of a pork chop, or piece of sirloin I was told to grab two slices of bread and butter them. Eat them, then decide if I wanted another pork chop, or small slice off of the sirloin. Of course I didn’t want any more after eating two slices of buttered bread, but that was dad’s way of stretching the meal across a family of eight.
I was given a savings account as a kid. I was given what they called then a “Christmas account”, with a little fold out booklet where you could log deposits, see the funds grow. The funds being maybe $ 20.38 in total. With me adding maybe $ 2 a week, my “allowance”. So that by Christmas week you could extract the $ 35 and change and buy presents for all six of your siblings, and some Old Spice aftershave for dad.
But I never taught my own kids a thing about actual money. How to open a checking account. How to delay gratification so that you didn’t get in trouble by running up credit card bills. How to balance a checkbook. Just because you have checks left doesn’t mean you can write them.
No, I never gave any of my children a lesson on buying a home, and how the interest payment would work. How the bank gets all their interest back up front in the early payments, and only in the late payments do you see the actual principal payment decline.
My dad once jokingly said to me, “Son, never spend the principal”. We laughed, and laughed. In our home that is all there was. Principal. When you have two grand total in the family savings account at five percent, that hundred dollars a year isn’t going to stretch very far. But we both knew when he said it that the rich have a few million invested. And their five percent yields tens of thousands.
I really didn’t teach my own children anything about any of that. In fact, there was a running joke in our family when the kids were all in high school. By then we’d done alright, and we had joined a country club. Tuesday night was “poker night”, and I was pretty good at Texas Hold ‘Em. As a salesman I could read people, and I was good enough at doing math to understand probabilities.
We would stay up practically all night at the club playing poker, and I’d win a grand, maybe a little more. When the kids woke up the next day I’d run into the three bedrooms and rain a few of the hundred dollar bills down on them, yelling “daddy won, daddy won, everybody wins”. And it would make for a raucous morning, everyone waking up, laughing, excited. But that surely didn’t give them any appreciation for the value of money at all. In fact, it had the opposite affect. I was giving out one bad lesson on the value of money. Made for a great trip to the Mall, but no appreciation for the value of a dollar.
From what I’ve read my own approach on teaching better money habits wasn’t unique. We all raised an entire generation who thinks just because you have extra checks left over it means you can write them out.
I thank God that all of my children have gone on to do well in careers, have their own businesses, manage money well, understand investments, and how to use a credit card sparingly, paying the bills within thirty days. But they learned all those things absent my own involvement. Perhaps the wife was in their ear when I wasn’t looking.
So I think two things.
I have also contributed to our societal decline. By the way I raised my children. The many things I didn’t teach them, the many things I taught them that were wrong.
Wanting a deck put onto the new home for enjoyment is great, but it is bad advice to say “hire a Mexican for that, your own time is too valuable”. Not only is it racist, but no one learns the lesson of a job well done, it doesn’t give the satisfaction of building something yourself. It doesn’t teach you additional skill sets.
What I find interesting is that I must be a product of my environment, because our entire generation paralleled my own failures in raising the next generation. We have all collectively raised a few generations that can’t work with their hands, don’t know how to budget money, and have become secular and separated from all organized religion.
We threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Managing money is crucial to personal success. Doing manual labor, chores around your own home, teaches life skills and saves you money at the same time. And organized religion comes with a heavy dose of morality and important life lessons. Church attendance may be tedious, and the sermon this weekend may seem pompous, the actual activities during mass archaic, and meaningless. But somewhere during the service we were all absorbing a moral lesson, a very serious sense of right, and wrong.
You still may have cut someone off on the way off of the church parking lot, but at least you knew you were doing something wrong.
In our family we do believe strongly in the sense that you do what you can to contribute to a better neighborhood. Which in turn makes for a better community. And eventually helps us all be a better nation.
But it is also true that not realizing our duties and obligations to past generations, to pass on learned skills, or life lessons, is important as well.
And I think as a generation we have collectively failed.
We blame the next generation. We say they are lazy and unmotivated. We say they don’t know how to manage money at all. How to delay gratification.
But I ask, where did they either learn those lessons, or not get the chance to learn?
I too am guilty
I think the way Hollywood movies sold sex to us was especially impactful.