Robert Scheer: Thanks for What? Gail Collins: Counting Really Small Blessings

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thanks_for_what_20111124/

 

 Thanks for What?

 

Robert Scheer

Truthdig: November 24th, 2011

I love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings back early childhood memories of the one day each year during the Depression when the food on my family’s table was not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that our local butcher offered at a steep discount.

But Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I obviously can’t recall what was served in 1936, the year I was born, the holiday was soon seared into my childhood memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the form of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various religious and political orders, much like the needy will be served today in volunteer kitchens across America and just as soon will be forgotten.

It did not take long before I was old enough to realize that the largesse of Thanksgiving was the rare exception, and that “just getting by,” as my mother’s brave optimism would have it, was the norm. Getting by, thanks to Mom’s piecework in the downtown sweatshops and my mechanic father’s signing on to one of the New Deal’s public jobs programs.

Then came the economic miracle of World War II, dismissed in its day by some Republicans as Franklin Roosevelt’s treachery, and my parents and other relatives got their jobs back. The relevance of the wartime jobs to Thanksgiving in our family was that my Uncle Edward, the welder, was rewarded every year at his plant with one enormous turkey or two smaller ones.

The result was what I recall as an annual day of bloating, as if my extended family was frantically storing calories in preparation for a severe economic winter that was certain to return. But for us it didn’t return. Not with the good union jobs that abounded in the postwar boom and the opportunities provided by the GI Bill and the spread of affordable college education that made upward mobility a truly plausible American goal.

Every time I need to be reminded of what was done for my generation in the way of generous government-funded programs, I reread the part of Colin Powell’s inspiring autobiography where he writes about the educational opportunities and vigorous community support programs that postwar kids in the Bronx were afforded. Powell and I were engineering students in the same class at the City College of New York, though I didn’t get to know him until he was famous and I spoke with him as a journalist. But the great opportunities available to us, as compared to what is available to the poor today, is a recognition we share.

I thought back to those buoyantly optimistic times at CCNY, the working-class Harvard as it was justifiably called, last week when students protesting onerous tuition hikes at the University of California got pepper-sprayed for their efforts to keep hope alive. The once excellent and very affordable UC system, like the publicly funded colleges of New York and elsewhere across the country, was the proud boast of moderate Republican and Democratic politicians who believed as did the nation’s Founders that equal opportunity leading to a land of stakeholders was the essential bedrock of America’s experiment in democracy.

No more. On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the bounty of that harvest as the stakes have been pulled up on 50 million Americans who have lost or soon will lose their homes. The housing crisis haunts a majority of Americans, even those who own their homes outright but have lost their jobs and must now sell in a downward-swirling housing market.

Good public education on every level, from preschool through college, is now a matter of inherited privilege reserved for those who can pick and choose affluent neighborhood settings for their children’s schools. And the prospect of affording one of those settings is dim for most parents in a country where securing a good job is beyond the reach of so many highly motivated people.

How many folks from my generation are honestly sanguine about the economic future of their children and grandchildren? What I have heard constantly, and just this week from a former top investment banker addressing a college class I teach, is that our offspring probably will face a decade of lost opportunity. I thought back to my college days and how shocked any of us, even those from the most impoverished of circumstances, would have been to hear such a prediction.

As The New York Times editorialized this Thanksgiving, “One in three Americans—100 million people—is either poor or perilously close to it.”

A bummer of a message, I know, until I think of those pepper-sprayed college students linking arms, and of all the Americans, young, old and between, who have occupied their minds with a challenge—that it doesn’t have to be this way. For their brave spirit of resistance we should be most grateful this Thanksgiving.

* * *

Counting Really Small Blessings

By GAIL COLLINS

NY Times Op-Ed: November 24, 2001

This year I am giving thanks for the Republican presidential debates.

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Gail Collins

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

I have a real tolerance for boring television, having watched at least two series now on the air about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers, as well as several segments of the show about extreme coupon-collecting. So the debates are right up my alley. After the 10th or 11th episode, you get a feeling of up-close interaction previously reserved for people who live in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters are so entitled that they find it hard to support anybody who hasn’t been to the house for dinner, or possibly a sleepover.

You come to know everybody’s special gimmicks. Newt Gingrich will say something snotty to the moderators to show he hates the news media. Whenever Rick Perry gets lost in the verbal weeds, he has taken to demanding that Congress be made part time. Michele Bachmann points out that she’s had 23 foster children. Mitt Romney’s special thing is to swear that, unlike President Obama, he will not apologize for the United States. Which Obama never did.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign was running an ad in New Hampshire that purported to show Obama in 2008, saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Which was actually Obama quoting John McCain’s campaign. Romney has a long and well-documented history of changing his positions. This time around, he is apparently also planning to just make things up.

But about the debates. My favorite this week was the Thanksgiving Family Forum, in which everybody in the race who isn’t a Mormon went to Iowa to compete for the love of the Christian right. This was the one in which Rick Perry assured the audience that because of his strong anti-abortion stance he would immediately end the policy of sending China “billions of dollars” in American foreign aid.

Who knew? Truly, it was the most interesting TV moment since I watched somebody bid way too much money for an abandoned storage locker containing fake leather furniture and a portrait of cats with big eyes.

The CNN national security debate had fewer cheap thrills, although it was fun hearing Herman Cain call Wolf Blitzer “Blitz.” Also there was Michele Bachmann’s description of her role in the debt-ceiling crisis. (“And my voice said this: I said it’s time for us to draw a line in the sand.”) It seemed to suggest she had come to see herself in the third person. Or maybe as an oracle. Or a ventriloquist.

These are the moments that get you through the long, hard periods where everybody but Ron Paul is competing to see who can promise to do the toughest things to Iran. (Let Israel bomb them! Bomb them ourselves! Let’s assassinate some nuclear scientists!)

This week’s biggest drama was the Newt Has a Heart Moment, when Gingrich said he believed an undocumented immigrant who had “been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church” should be given some avenue to legal status. Bachmann instantly and repeatedly claimed Newt was talking about “11 million people,” which sounds like one heck of a lot of 25-year-resident grandparents.

“Amnesty is a magnet,” said Romney, who has spent two presidential campaigns branding his opponents as amnesty-givers.

You could see Perry’s face light up. This was so clearly his moment to point out that Mitt Romney used to have illegal immigrants mowing his lawn.

“Here we go again, Mitt. You and I, standing by each other again, and you used the words about the magnets,” Perry started. But you could almost hear the alarms going off. The candidates have been urged/bullied/blackmailed into avoiding personal attacks on one another.

“And that’s one of the things that we obviously have to do, is to stop those magnets of — for individuals to come in here,” Perry concluded, retreating fast. Nobody even noticed, since he talks like that even when he is saying what he intended to say.

This is totally unfair to the loyal debate watchers. I guess now there’s no chance anybody will ask Romney about the day he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

On the plus side, there was the moment at the Family Forum when Rick Santorum explained how God had arranged his come-from-behind win of a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. “And I really felt blessed that I knew at that moment, when I won, I had a constituency of One,” he burbled.

Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster who served as moderator, asked Santorum what message God was sending when he then lost the seat — by what I believe was 17 percentage points.

Santorum was momentarily silenced. Really thankful for that.