Are We Really Making America Great Again?

I came to America in the early fifties. Unlike some who arrived after the war by boat, or plane, I slipped in by birth. The sun was shining on America in those days. The U.S. had recently won a well-publicized war, we were flush with cash, opportunity, and ambition. There was no shortage of ideas, muscle, or the political will to making America our many dreams one happy reality. Beaver and Wally Cleaver lived just down the road, our father (everyone had one in those days) always knew best, and your mom’s friend Donna Reed could whip up a mean apple pie in the kitchen.

Those days are gone. But it hasn’t stopped a parade of hind-sighters who desperately lament those by-gone days when life seemed to be normal. All of those folks who lament the good old days of family values, seem to forget that the nineteen-fifties, as we remember those years, happened mostly on TV.

In the nineteen-fifties, America was almost as racist as the eighteen-fifties, in the nineteen-fifties, some of you senior folk might recall that black people couldn’t share civil life with whites in certain parts of the country. There was something called segregation, an end-run around the Emancipation Proclamation. Segregation permeated southern life and echoed throughout the country. Even as late as 1974, school busing issues even in Yankee Massachusetts revealed America’s not-so-suppressed racism.

In the nineteen-fifties, if your birth control didn’t work for you, or you found yourself underage with a pregnancy, your God-fearing parents, didn’t often offer to help raise your child with the support of a sympathetic community. Instead, you were probably whisked away in the middle of the night to an undisclosed Ohio location for an abortion, or maybe to Aunt Clara’s upstate farm until you came to term and quickly gave the baby up for adoption. Just another one of those good old family values that some patriotic Americans seem to ignore.

In the nineteen-fifties, and if you were gay, you’d probably rather be black. Today we talk about gays ‘coming out’; a reference to the complete phrase ‘coming out of the closet.’ That‘s because during the fifties most gays were hiding in any closet they could find. From intense social ostracizing to felony laws in some states, to threats to one’s personal safety, the LGBTQI+ community hid in a dark corner of society and became dirty because our country soiled them with its homophobia and ignorance.

The fifties was the decade just before we had a Presidential assassination, a history-changing civil rights movement, an illegal war fabricated out of demagoguery and hubris, a generational schism of historic proportions, and a near nuclear war. What about the decade before? That was World War II. There was never normal. Now, after seventy years of progress, it appears we’re back, in 1950.  Are we really making America great again?

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