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This isn’t the country I grew up in.
Oh sure, it still looks the same on the map; still goes by the name of United States of America. We all stand up for the same anthem, and there are no new faces on Mount Rushmore. We added a couple of stars to the flag just before Ike moved from Pennsylvania Ave., but other than that, it hasn’t changed.
But it didn’t take long watching the Democrats in Denver for me to realize that, no doubt about it, this isn’t the country it was 40 years ago.
Compared with 1968, this year’s confab would look to be a comparative yawner — the mayor of Chicago is still named Daley, but there isn’t a Yippie in sight. Looking at the crowd, the hair is short and the ties are on — it sure looks like The Revolution is over.
If it is, one look to the platform will tell you which side won. There’s a black woman up there and she’s not fetching coffee or tidying up. Her husband is the nominee. No-siree folks, this isn’t your grandpappy’s Democratic Party. And whoever is elected in November won’t be presiding over your grandpappy’s U.S., either.
If you have any doubt, just remember that Barack Obama’s parents would have been committing a crime in 22 states when they married in 1961. Four years later, Virginia Judge Leon Bazile, offered up the unashamed opinion that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”
That’s the country I grew up in. It was a country where George Wallace could proclaim his loyalty to “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and five years later carry five states and win 46 electoral votes..
Nobody talked about glass ceilings in that country. When I was growing up, the only thought women gave to ceilings concerned cobwebs in the corners and the need for a fresh coat of paint before the holidays. A woman’s place was in the home, everybody knew that. If a girl went to college, she was after an MRS degree and once she had that, her proper next step on the academic ladder would be a PhT — Putting Hubby Through. Archie Bunker had it down pat when he sang, “And you know who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.”
And there wasn’t anything in between. Back then, “gay” generally brought to mind the 1890s or the capital of France. The idea that those bachelor farmers might have more than a love of dairy cows in common never crossed our mind, much less that spinster schoolteachers shared anything more intimate than the rent.
Not only did we live in a country that was exclusively heterosexual — only after marriage and only to produce children — but a country so hard up for Hispanics that when we needed one for TV, the role fell to a Hungarian Jew — William Szathmary; aka Bill Dana; aka José Jiménez.
But, even after four decades, a few things seem to have stayed the same. The Russians are still sticking their nose into their neighbors’ business — Georgia this year, Czechoslovakia in 1968. U.S. troops are still fighting wars started by presidents with a fundamentally faulty grasp of the truth. The Vikings haven’t won a Super Bowl, and the Cubs haven’t won a pennant.
And in 1968, waiting in the wings were a whole bunch of things we hadn’t even thought of yet. Gas was still cheap, but five years and another Middle East war would change that. After OPEC shut off the tap in 1973, there was no more taking gas for granted. In 1968, the Red Chinese exported revolution, not tennis shoes, auto parts and air conditioners.
Three years before Ping-Pong Diplomacy first breached the Great Wall, there was no imagining that one day the men in Mao suits would dominate world trade, host the Olympics and have U.S. school children urged to study Mandarin.
Two years before the first Earth Day, global warming was just a topic for My Weekly Reader’s “far off in the future” feature. Well, the future is now.
But this surely isn’t the country I grew up in.
It’s a much better one.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winona
dailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
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