Vicki and I invited my high school classmates to dinner last night. The first to arrive was the secretary of our class. I greeted her by saying, “Welcome Madame Secretary!” She replied, “Thanks for having us here, Mr. President.” Everyone was vaccinated plus booster. I think we all have had an experience similar to what I had last night where our expectations for a gathering are one thing and we are surprised that it becomes something very different. Last night was certainly one of those nights for me.
We were together for four and a half hours and quickly I had confirmed in our conversation what I thought as well as received new revelations of living in a working-class community with school friends. There were themes that were evident.
All of us had challenges in our private lives. Everyone knew about my father’s stroke when I was in 10th grade which put us in financial hardship, but that is all that they knew. My classmates asked almost as one, “How come we didn’t share our personal challenges with one another?” The answer that came back was, “You just didn’t do that where we lived.” Another comment was made about a paucity of hugs or emotional expressions from our parents. It was all about what you did and not how you feel in our community. One said, “No hugs!”
The subject of race relations and diversity issues today came up and how it was for us in our very diverse community. It was universally working class but very diverse in terms of race and religion. I thought about that old adage that a “fish can not image life without water because that is all they know.” Although some parents were racist, it wasn’t true for me or my classmates as we swam in the water of diversity with great friends who were black or Roman Catholic. We have forgotten the anti-Catholic sentiments in our nation which was another ism. We had Roman Catholic churches for Italians, Irish, and Polish. My family was half Catholic and half Episcopalian.
When parents showed prejudice of the Archie Bunker type, we would work around their beliefs never confronting parents for we knew somehow that they were wrong on this issue. I walked to school with a polish Roman Catholic neighbor who was a six foot six, two hundred thirty pounds tackle on the football team and an African American defensive end and co-captain on the football team. When I injured an African American player in a football tackling drill, his friends indicated they would see me after practice. The African American student who I walked to school with stood with me, and the issue died because of his support. Like the fish, this was my classmates and my water. We didn’t know any better. We learned the isms, except one, after we left the community.
The one exception was classism. It was the biggest player shaping most of us. We knew this because our parents worked with their hands and not with their minds. Education was an afterthought. It was about this time of our youth where the signs of the downfall of industries that supported the financial life of our parents with work was seen on the horizon. It seemed to have a domino effect that included a tire company, a wire company, a textile company, a chemical company, and of course, the steel mill where I worked to pay for college. I thought I was the only one of us in the steel mill, but there was someone else at the gathering who said he was there too for the same reason. We never connected because he worked the dead man’s shift from 11-7. I worked a required 10 hours shift from 7 -5 in a very different part of the plant. Remember this is summer! He had to put on a rubber suit in order to clean vats with acid in the open hearth. When his dad picked him up at the end of his shift, he shared with the group that his dad said, “Never tell your mother what you are doing!” I shared with the group that I work shoveling coal for ten hours a day onto belts, some of which were underground, to take the coal to the ovens to be transformed to the higher heating of coke necessary to make the steel.
I was black from head to foot. The heat and inability to breathe was unbearable. When my father picked me up, he didn’t say anything, I told them, “he just cried.” He was filled with guilt for his stroke changed his trade from the highly regarded butcher to the lowly fish man. “I simply told him, “I got this!’
I shared with the group that later in life I sat next to the owner of the mill as circumstances put us together. My classmates leaned forward and asked, “What did you say to him?” I told them that I shared that “the conditions of his mill were right out of the turn of the century. It was brutal.” They were eager to hear what he said to me. His response was, “Let me tell you about the unions.” Everyone including college students during the summer had to join the union. They were needed in the beginning because of the abuse of management, but then they got out of control. I am convinced there wasn’t a higher paying job for people such as myself or my classmate than what we did in that mill. In working class America, you have money on your mind, and like the thoughts of those of the depression era, it never leaves the older you get. As it turned out, the person sitting next to me at dinner on my left was the owner’s secretary and told others of the many times the workers were warned about their outrageous demands. When the mill closed, the workers came to the locked gates in disbelief. They thought the management was lying to them.
What followed in the community were take overs of the various other industries by people who came in to save them who were really pirates seeking to close the mills and make a great profit. They were raiders! The person to my right had worked in one mill for 35 years. The mill was sold off. His pension was wiped out. He never received a cent. This caused the community to rapidly go downhill. However, today it is a place for the new professional class. How ironic!
I write all of this because this is a microcosm of what is happening in America today. It helps us all to understand the anger of why people would vote for Donald Trump. To use Trump’s own words to the Democrats, “You people put me here. You are why I got elected.” Think about his base. Classism needs to be regarded with the same seriousness as the other “isms.” Think about the person to my right at the class gathering at my home. He lost everything because of the greed of another who never looked back with a ting of regret! America, wake up and smell the coffee!!!
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