One of the great truisms of life is that people tend to believe that the world begin with their birth.
This is of course quite normal in the sense that our experience of the outside world begins in that moment. This is of course why having two good parents makes all the difference because those early experiences are going to shape you heavily.
It’s also the reason why the left is so anxious and so intent on getting to the school kids from the sexual grooming to the rewriting and abolishing of history because without knowledge of history people do not understand how the world works.
To illustrate this let me turn back to Stacy McCain’s piece that I referenced yesterday. Let’s hear about his ambition as a young man:
When I was a young man, I was full of wild and reckless ambition. My dream was to become a multimillionaire rock star, to record a string of platinum-selling albums, tour the world, marry Brooke Shields and retire by age 30 to enjoy my wealth in a mansion on my own private island.
Readers may laugh at this, but I was very serious about it — driving a forklift in an industrial warehouse, saving up to buy a P.A. system for my band — and my idea was, “Why bother with small dreams?”
The advantage of small dreams is they are easier to achieve. My dreams were much smaller, degree, wife, family and my own business and by age 28 I met them. While the business eventually failed and reverses took me out of the job that of my degree both Stacy & I ended up very much in the same place:
Things didn’t work out the way I’d planned, of course, and becoming a mere journalist would have once seemed to me a great disappointment, but certainly I’ve succeeded in many ways that others might envy. My lovely wife and I have raised six children and now have five grandchildren, and in my maturity, I’ve come to appreciate the value of something I once viewed with disdain, i.e., middle-class respectability.
If you asked me what I want for my children and grandchildren, that’s it in a nutshell.
This is where a knowledge of history becomes huge. How could someone like Stacy, who has been all over the country, rubbed elbows with people of wealth and consequence, someone who has seen so much have such a small ambitions for his children and grandchildren?
The answer is simple, because he understands that for almost the entire history of humanity that middle class respectability was a pipe dream. That’s 97% chance to avoid poverty was a wild dream that people strived for.
Consider. For most of human history life was about:
- Finding food for the day
- Finding shelter for the night
- Finding safety from attack
And you’ll note that this list doesn’t even touch on avoiding disease or preserving food because those things are luxuries when you don’t have those first three things covered.
For most of human history this was what it was all about. It took generations upon generations to get to the point where a solid chunk of the population.
Even when the basics of farming were developed it was a question of storing food in a way that meant you would have something to eat the next day, if another person or an animal didn’t take it first that is.
Consider for a moment why so many people came to America after it’s founding and in the 19th century. They came because they believed that by hard work they would be able to achieve those basic goals. Such people were even willing to waive the 3rd goal for a time, heading west figuring that if they worked hard enough they would eventually have a safe place for themselves and their children.
And remember these were the days before electricity. Survival required toil, unrelenting toil, the type the the young people of today objecting to the idea of having to work for a living couldn’t imagine and likely wouldn’t survive.
And even if you managed to reach a point where your food supply and shelter both from the elements and from attack were secure, you weren’t affluent, you were breaking even.
John McCormick the former speaker of the house knew this when in 1968 the Reverend Ralph Abernathy & a group of fifty marchers from the “poor people’s march on washington” who he had invited to his office were talking down to him and he answered:
You’re talking down at me, Let me tell you, I was poor when poor was POOR.
Tip O’Neill Man of the House 1987 page 123
McCormick knew not only his own history but the history of the Irish people and understood the difference between being poor in a country that provided assistance and a safety net to those in need and those who did not. Furthermore he understood the great efforts it had taken to get the country into a position where it could provide the assistance it did.
Alas in a way the country is a victim of its own success. One of the reasons why so many people who are the children, grandchildren and great grand children of the World War 2 generation sneer at the idea of having to earn their way is that the world war 2 generation and those who came before it were so successful in creating a rich and safe country where the sky was the limit that they assume all of this is the norm.
The efforts my grandparents had to make when they came to this country in 1906 were drilled into me along the sacrifices involved in getting through the great depression and the 2nd world war and are a large part of my world view. Likewise Stacy McCain by understanding the poverty of his ancestors like from Winston Wood Bolt captured on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and those who came before is able to appreciate what he has today:
Our father’s mother, Ma McCain, was more stoic in temperament, as she still resided on the family farm near the Little Tallapoosa River, where she drew her water from the well, cooked on a wood-burning stove and didn’t have indoor plumbing until about 1969. To use the bathroom at Ma McCain’s you went out behind the barn.
Having some sense of the hardship of my pioneer ancestors’ life on the frontier — Ma McCain hoed her vegetable garden well into her 80s — conveyed to me the idea that I was the descendant of survivors. Whatever difficulties and challenges I’ve faced in life are as nothing compared to what my ancestors lived through 150 or 200 years ago. Considering that my own father came within an inch of death in World War II, I think of my existence as somewhat miraculous, and therefore I should be grateful to God even to be alive. How many young Americans today grow up with this sense of themselves as a descendant of heroic survivors?
Stacy can trace his ancestry much further back than I can but in the end our ancestors, my Sicilian Catholics and his English & Scottish protestants had something in common.
While both were by any measurable standard of today would have been considered poor, they did not consider themselves poor but where instead grateful for the chance to be in a country where they could live their lives with those basic things needed in relative security and have a chance to improve their lot and the lot of their children so perhaps their lives could be just a bit easier.
This is why it is so vital for the left do destroy and erase the history of western civilization in general and America in particular and destroy the young’s connection with their ancestors.. A people who understand that their comforts that are their norm rest on the foundation of a culture build by their forebears who suffered hardships so their descendants would not have to is not likely to dismiss either said ancestors or the culture that they built.
Thus they have no appreciation for when poor was poor and because of this they are at a much better chance to find out firsthand.
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