Daily Kos :: Losing My Religion: A Crisis of Political Faith

Losing My Religion: A Crisis of Political Faith
by stephdray

Fri Dec 3rd, 2004 at 19:38:47 CDT

Warning: Contents are an essay about personal-political pain. I apologize for myopia in advance. I promise, I will bury myself in work to try to get over it.

My Faith in the American Dream

My grandparents were immigrants.

They came from Italy with nothing. This country welcomed them at Ellis Island with the kind of open arms that would be unheard of today. Lady Liberty smiled down on them. America was still proud Lady Liberty was a gift from France--we liked being respected in the world.

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Once here, my grandparents worked hard to achieve the American Dream.

Then the Great Depression came.

They were hungry, but proud. When my great uncle changed his last name from 'Marcanio' to 'Marc' so that he could find work, the family never spoke to him again.

They ate frogs, and squirrels, and dug up wild mushrooms to survive. My great grandmother had two miscarriages.

My grandfather's family suffered so much from cold that his brother tried to steal coal from a passing train. He was killed in the attempt.

The family never got over the shame of the stealing, or the death of the boy.

They did, however, survive the Great Depression because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

The government employed them and helped them survive. And once they were on their feet again, they never forgot it. So deeply imbedded was the obligation, that both my grandfathers enlisted in the military during World War II, even though one of them had not yet become a naturalized citizen and was an only son. He was asked to go back to Italy, and fight Italians. He did so, without hesitation, because he believed himself to be an American; he believed in the righteousness of a government that took care of its people and fought fascism abroad.

After the war, they lived their American Dream.

My father was born and my grandfather named him after the brother who had been killed stealing coal. My grandfather knew that he had built an America in which his son would never have to steal coal.

In fact, my father went to college. Both of my parents did; they became professionals, and answered John F. Kennedy's call to national service too. And I was raised into their American dream, believing that it was possible for anyone.

You see, the New Deal was literally that--a new social contract between the people and the government, no less revolutionary than the Magna Carta. In essence, the New Deal was a promise that the government would take care of the people in exchange for the people giving back money and service to the government. This was a sacred promise--and the Greatest Generation believed in it. They paid into the system to support the elderly and the poor with the expectation that future generations would support them.

They built the infrastructure that made this country great. They built roads, they built power-plants, they put up telephone wires, they cleared forests, they planted forests, and they built cities and schools. They built the most prosperous economy in the history of mankind. There's not a dime that you or I have earned our whole lives long that was not built upon their blood, sweat, and tears--and if we kept our promise, there would not be a dime our children earned that they did not owe, in part, to us.

That was the New Deal.

One month ago today, my country rejected and broke this sacred promise."