Why are you so *angry*, Manny?

[frazzled]

13. This country was never quite as great as we like to say it used to be

I remember segregation; I remember the draft and Vietnam, and the 50,000+ young men my age who were drafted and died there—who never got to get a job or a home or a pension. I remember the stories of how my father, with his master's degree, couldn't be hired because the major pharmaceutical company in our area did not hire Jews. He never had a pension (though was able to work late in life and put some away, and is lucky enough to be part of the "notch" that gets higher Social Security than those who were born after him.) I remember Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta.

I'm a little young to remember the Army McCarthy hearings, but I came to know several people who lost their livelihoods during that period--who had to leave the country and go to Europe to make a living.

America was really never that great if you were Black or Latino or, frankly, a woman: economic inequality was as great for these groups then as it is for everyone now. It was maybe pretty good if you were a white male, either working in a steel mill or a graduate of an Ivy League college. (It's still pretty good if you're the latter.) So white boys, you're angry? Join the rest of us.

The good old days were not truly all that good. And 40 or 50 years from now, people will be talking about how this used to be a great country in the 2010s, but now (in 2060), it's a wreck.

On edit: I remember too when we finally bought our first house. We were in our 30s and had two children already, and we still had to borrow money from my folks for the down payment, despite being highly educated. The interest rate on that house was 9%. It was about 1400 square feet and had one bathroom (we eventually made a 3/4 bath in the basement). We lived in it for more than a dozen years (and would have stayed there if we hadn't had to move to another state).