1 Boring Old Man

It is A Question of Doing What’s Right, like in the post from Reddhedd on Firedoglake. She apparently grew up in the coal mining areas of West Virginia that were so hard-hit by the recent mining accident. I didn’t. I was raised way south of there in Tennessee. But more than the geographic distance, it was light years away in another way – my father went off to work as a teacher, and a coach, and later as a white collar manager at a textile mill. But it was always in the background, always. My dad grew up in a large Italian immigrant family in one of those gothic towns on the Ohio River where the eras of life were measured between coal mine disasters and strikes at the steel mills.

Every summer, off we’d go for a two week visit to the world of his childhood. It was a bit like the Yeats’ line about Ireland, "a terrible beauty." His family lived on a bricked street in a house his father built, rambling among houses other fathers had built. English was the language of the young on that street, but there was no other uniform primary language – Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, and who knows what else. In the daytime, it was a world of women and children – the men left for the mines or the mills before daybreak. It was a festive world with huge family dinners every night, at least when my father and his brother showed up during those summer weeks – prodigal sons who’d escaped south to college by playing a mean game of fooball.

For a kid like me growing on the right end of the middle class in the post-war suburbs on the Tennessee/Georgia line, it might as well have been Mars. When we would hear of a brother killed in a mining accident, or a family ruined by the latest strike at the mill, my father would head north to do his part in the family rite, but he kept us away from all that. The effect it had on me was much more indirect. I came to understand that I was being raised to survive in the harsh world of The Depression, the years when my dad’s family dug up abandoned lead pipes to sell for survival, or the paper routes, or the desparate edge to his love of sports, or the energy he poured into digging his vegetable garden, or why I spent my summers unloading boxcars in that mill he managed. I was being raised to pack up what few belongings I had in the mountains of Italy and travel to the dark regions of Appalachia to spend my days digging coal and my nights dreaming of how to escape my fate.

Only I wasn’t growing up in that world. Over time, I came to even appreciate the pressure to achieve that lead my sister and I to spend a collective couple of decades on an analyst’s couches. I was able to understand that many of my difficult feelings were transgenerationally transmitted, unrelated to the world I actually lived in. And some of it was very good. There was never a problem with success – we both were doomed to it. Work ethic was in my DNA. I liked the blue collar underpinnings to my white collar career and life. I appreciated the social activism and compassion for the plight of others that came, in part, from my dad’s dark childhood as an immigrant in the coal fields of Ohio. I’m glad about the almost automatic understanding of what made this country great, why my grandparents came to the blackened world of Appalachia and were glad to be there.

The mining accident in West Virginia brought it all back for me too. It made me angry. Our country is currently under the control of the bosses. Our social programs have been disassembled. There’s a contemptuous attitude about our poor and disadvantaged. Our soldiers are supposed to come home and forget where they’ve been. Our hurricane victims are supposed to recover on their own. Our medically uninsured are just out of luck – too bad. Our gravely mentally ill are living under bridges.

I got this as an email joke from a friend who derives a lot of pleasure from torturing Democrats like me:

One day a florist goes to a barber for a haircut. After the cut he asked about his bill and the barber replies: "I’m sorry, I cannot accept money from you; I’m doing community service this week"
The florist is pleased and leaves the shop. Next morning When the barber goes to open there is a thank you card and a dozen roses waiting for him at his door.
Later, a cop comes in for a haircut, and when he goes to Pay his bill the barber again replies: "I’m sorry, I cannot accept Money from you; I’m doing community service this week."
The cop is happy and leaves the shop. Next morning when the barber goes to open up there is a thank you card and a dozen donuts waiting for him at his door.
Later a Republican comes in for a haircut, and when he goes to pay his bill the barber again replies: "I’m sorry, I cannot accept money from you; I’m doing community service this week
The Republican is very happy and leaves the shop. Next morning when the barber goes to open, there is a thank you card and a dozen different books such as "How to Improve Your Business" and "Becoming More Successful."
Then a Democrat comes in for a haircut, and when he goes to pay his bill the barber again replies: "I’m sorry, I cannot accept money from you; I’m doing community service this week." The Democrat is very happy and leaves the shop.
The next morning when the barber goes to open up, there are a dozen Democrats lined up waiting for a free haircut.
And that, my friends, illustrates the fundamental difference between left and right.

It’s not funny, that joke. It’s the fiction that is choking the very life out of the American experiment. America is about the miners and the victims of Katrina. Our problem is in our ghettos and our insensitivity to what they really mean. We don’t need to be racing around the world spreading our way of life right now, we need to get back to remembering how to live it.

I hate what happened in West Virginia this week, but I appreciate the reminders. The friend that sent the joke escaped the same fate as my father. My dad was a Republican too. It’s easy for the people who made it out [with the kind of talent and determination it takes to get out] to see the ones left behind as weak, or freeloaders. And sometimes that’s even true. But right now, our pendulum has swung so far off the mark that we’ve lost the feel of our own pulse.