by Robert Scheer
November 24, 2011
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thanks_for_what_20111124/
I love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings
back early childhood memories of the one day each year
during the Depression when the food on my family's table was
not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer
sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that
our local butcher offered at a steep discount.
But Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I
obviously can't recall what was served in 1936, the year I
was born, the holiday was soon seared into my childhood
memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the
form of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various
religious and political orders, much like the needy will be
served today in volunteer kitchens across America and just
as soon will be forgotten.
It did not take long before I was old enough to realize that
the largesse of Thanksgiving was the rare exception, and
that "just getting by," as my mother's brave optimism would
have it, was the norm. Getting by, thanks to Mom's piecework
in the downtown sweatshops and my mechanic father's signing
on to one of the New Deal's public jobs programs.
Then came the economic miracle of World War II, dismissed in
its day by some Republicans as Franklin Roosevelt's
treachery, and my parents and other relatives got their jobs
back. The relevance of the wartime jobs to Thanksgiving in
our family was that my Uncle Edward, the welder, was
rewarded every year at his plant with one enormous turkey or
two smaller ones.
The result was what I recall as an annual day of bloating,
as if my extended family was frantically storing calories in
preparation for a severe economic winter that was certain to
return. But for us it didn't return. Not with the good union
jobs that abounded in the postwar boom and the opportunities
provided by the GI Bill and the spread of affordable college
education that made upward mobility a truly plausible
American goal.
Every time I need to be reminded of what was done for my
generation in the way of generous government-funded
programs, I reread the part of Colin Powell's inspiring
autobiography where he writes about the educational
opportunities and vigorous community support programs that
postwar kids in the Bronx were afforded. Powell and I were
engineering students in the same class at the City College
of New York, though I didn't get to know him until he was
famous and I spoke with him as a journalist. But the great
opportunities available to us, as compared to what is
available to the poor today, is a recognition we share.
I thought back to those buoyantly optimistic times at CCNY,
the working-class Harvard as it was justifiably called, last
week when students protesting onerous tuition hikes at the
University of California got pepper-sprayed for their
efforts to keep hope alive. The once excellent and very
affordable UC system, like the publicly funded colleges of
New York and elsewhere across the country, was the proud
boast of moderate Republican and Democratic politicians who
believed as did the nation's Founders that equal opportunity
leading to a land of stakeholders was the essential bedrock
of America's experiment in democracy.
No more. On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the
bounty of that harvest as the stakes have been pulled up on
50 million Americans who have lost or soon will lose their
homes. The housing crisis haunts a majority of Americans,
even those who own their homes outright but have lost their
jobs and must now sell in a downward-swirling housing
market.
Good public education on every level, from preschool through
college, is now a matter of inherited privilege reserved for
those who can pick and choose affluent neighborhood settings
for their children's schools. And the prospect of affording
one of those settings is dim for most parents in a country
where securing a good job is beyond the reach of so many
highly motivated people.
How many folks from my generation are honestly sanguine
about the economic future of their children and
grandchildren? What I have heard constantly, and just this
week from a former top investment banker addressing a
college class I teach, is that our offspring probably will
face a decade of lost opportunity. I thought back to my
college days and how shocked any of us, even those from the
most impoverished of circumstances, would have been to hear
such a prediction.
As The New York Times editorialized this Thanksgiving, "One
in three Americans - 100 million people - is either poor or
perilously close to it."
A bummer of a message, I know, until I think of those
pepper-sprayed college students linking arms, and of all the
Americans, young, old and between, who have occupied their
minds with a challenge - that it doesn't have to be this
way. For their brave spirit of resistance we should be most
grateful this Thanksgiving.
[Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a
reputation for strong social and political writing over his
30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers
across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made
headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine
interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his
heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los
Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill
Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural
figures.
Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing
editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976
to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los
Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet
Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In
1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the
Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor.
That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now
based at Truthdig.]
