Losing touch with the past is too easy

We had a wedding in the family earlier this summer.

The younger of our two sons was the first to go down the aisle. No one can guess when the older son will take the plunge. He is apparently looking for perfection in a mate. I like to think he takes after his mother.

Weddings are eye openers, in so many ways. You don’t know how many things can go wrong planning a wedding until you’re involved in one. In the end, everything went perfectly, more a testament to the bride and groom, Jessica and Jonathan, and the bride’s parents, Joe and Alexis Riffle, and my wife, Cheryl, than to me. I did a little painting, spread a few yards of mulch and finally finished the kitchen floor I started replacing months earlier.

Times do change. I was in a number of weddings of friends in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I do not recall one of them having a limousine. Today, kids start renting limos for homecoming dances when they’re freshmen in high school.

And speaking of limousines, I can attest that a limousine rental today can cost more than a perfectly respectable wedding reception in, say, 1971, at a very nice little restaurant, such as the El Rio in Warren. Honestly.

I suspect that today’s conspicuous middle class consumption reflects a willingness by us baby boomers to give our kids more than they need. Perhaps it’s because our parents were determined to give us more than they had. Of course they wanted to give us more — they grew up in the Great Depression. What’s our excuse?

I was born in 1946, and my living history pretty much starts with the Kennedy assassination. But I developed some appreciation of the Depression and WWII because all the adults in my life and all of my teachers had lived through it.

A few days after the wedding I got a glimpse of what a break there has been between the history that affected me and that which has shaped the lives and politics of the next generation.

A trip home

My older son and I joined my brother, one of his sons and his daughter-in-law and their three kids on a day trip to Pittsburgh. We toured the South Side neighborhood where my brother and I grew up, where our parents and grandparents spent most of their lives.

My paternal grandparents were dirt poor. My maternal grandmother raised my mother on a widow’s pension she received after my grandfather, a Pittsburgh policeman, was shot in the line of duty.

My brother and I grew up in blue-collar Democratic household, though he’s been in Florida 20 years and is more of a Southern Democrat. As we were growing up, it was a given that we would be the first to go to college and that, while the family was growing more prosperous in the ’50s and ’60s, we were expected to do better.

My nephew and his wife are rock-ribbed Republicans, as, I suppose befits a vice president of a rental car company who is a little more than midway between 30 and 40 and midway between making six figures and seven figures. There is no question that my nephew is bright, well-educated, personable, good looking and hard working. He's also had the advantage of growing up in a stable home, with two professional parents. He never wanted for anything in his youth and has been lucky to be at the right place and the right time to capitalize on his talents and his work ethic.

The day after our Pittsburgh trip, we allowed ourselves the only lengthy political discussion of their visit. It ended well enough.

But what struck me was that this young well-educated couple, who are raising their children in an atmosphere of privilege that none of their forbearers could have imagined, had no idea of the truly humble circumstances of our family just two and three generations removed.

It never occurred to them — and they still may not believe — that their lives could be very different today. The Depression fashioned attitudes about frugality, delaying gratification, investing in infrastructure and gave us Social Security. World War II molded the national resolve, spawned the GI Bill and provided a booming post-war economy.The war would not have been won without the discipline that grew out of the Depression and without public schools that provided educated men and women who served in the Army and Navy and who built the war machines that the nation rode to victory. Without the progressive income tax, the breaking of the trusts, decent wages for workers and a half dozen other things that conservatives despise, the class mobility that has benefited my family — just one family among millions — would never have existed.

That is well worth remembering.

X Mangan is editorial page editor of The Vindicator. Bertram de Souza was away; his column will return next Sunday.