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My father was born not long after the first world war, which made him a teenager when the Great Depression hit. He was one of a half dozen surviving children of a man who worked on gas wells until (1930) he was injured in an explosion and then his wife left him. They had nothing. Then came the Second World War. His war, in the Pacific, was indeed hell.
After the war he became part of the great growing America - and he lived the american dream. He was a staunch Republican, he supported the war I fought in even after I came home and told him that it was wrong.
The old man used to read magazines, lots and lots of magazines. He read Life Magazine, and True Magazine, and Popular Mechanics, and of course the Reader's Digest; he even got their condensed books on a monthly basis. These were the good times and he had damned well earned them.
The old man, who worked at a power plant, always belonged to a union. I too have been a life-long Union member and just wanted to mention it - with pride. The union treated him well. He earned wages unheard of in his younger days. He got paid days off if he was sick, he even got paid vacation.
The vacation was the thing. You see that was the one promise that was constantly made to my father and the rest of the working men and women of his generation. They were promised leisure. That may not sound like much to you and me but to a generation that had to scramble every minute of their life just to eat it was no small thing at all.
And now I look back, with the old man no long in the grave, and I wonder what happened to all that leisure time he worked so hard for so very many years to earn? Where is it now? My wife and I, both now retired, had to both work to keep up a household that roughly equaled what my father was able to support alone. We worked more hours than he did and our jobs were in greater peril from outside competition and unfavorable national policy. Oh, my bosses made a lot more than my father's bosses and at the top of the companies we each worked for there was simply no comparison in compensation. The leisure his generation and then mine earned (and I should have shared in and passed on to my son) was stolen from him and turned into cash by the very top levels of management in the very companies we built.
Ask any Republican and they will tell you we are now in an ownership society. You can not complain about corporate America because indeed you are a part of it. Some absurd percentage of us is supposed to own stock in one way or another. Look at your retirement package, look at your life insurance, maybe you're so lucky as to have private investments too. The myth is we are all owners, we all are part of this great corporate America. Well, if we are all the owners, all in control, then tell me when the last time you voted for any of the top officers in any company you supposedly own stock in. Tell me just what control we, the ownership society, what control we have over this beast of a society we supposedly own.
Rant over. Thank you for your time.
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