A Generation of Anger

I could have called this column "Why They're Pissed Off."

Basic stump speeches talk about how candidates will help the nation return to American values. Those speeches often embrace themes of how we have gotten away from the Constitution and what the founding fathers intended. They continue to blame most of the problems in the country on so-called radical deviations from the "American way of life."

I had an exchange recently with someone who assured me that an ancestor of theirs was really a Republican, even though he was elected governor of a great state as a Democrat. He told me the guy was only a Democrat because Republicans could not get elected in that state back then.

History is a wonderful thing. You can actually look back and give context to a lot of attitudes that exists decades or generations later.

There was a time, after the Civil War, when most voters in the 11 states that made of the Confederacy were Democrats. They stayed Democrats for decades because they blamed Republicans and Abraham Lincoln for changing the way of life of their most privileged friends.

One hundred years later, Lyndon Johnson changed their way of life with the stroke of a pen.  What Johnson, the Texas Democrat, did was sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But getting to the point where he had that option was not easy. It took months of negotiation, weeks of debate, and a lot of public attention to make that happen.

The one time that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. ever met face to face was March 26, 1964. They were in the gallery of the Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol to observe the Senate debate of the Civil Rights Act. A Democrat named Robert Byrd of West Virginia unsuccessfully had filibustered to block the vote.

When the final votes were tallied, the Democrats in the House voted 153 to 91 and Republicans voted 136 to 35 for passage. In the Senate, the vote was 44 to 23 for the Democrats and 23 to six for the Republicans.

President Johnson said on July 2, 1964 that American values made passage inevitable. It also cleared the way for a raft of changes that many people believe made America stronger. While passage of laws and inaction of regulations set standards for compliance, working toward institutional change and overcoming generations of injustice has been a constant struggle ever since.

In 1967, older and younger workers gained protections  under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Provisions of that law helped protect members of the World War II generation from upstart Baby Boomers as they reached the ends of their working lives.

In 1975, Congress passed the Sex Discrimination Act, and within 20 years or so, the game of grab ass became politically incorrect in the workplace. Seventeen years later, women of every age and every description and some men still have to struggle against workplace harassment and disparate treatment.

In 1978, the Ethics in Government Act passed and with the help of the federal courts, government workers gained a variety of protections designed to give them the same protections available to those in the private sector.

These were followed by the Americans with Disabilities Act  and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. Those laws gave disabled people access to jobs and facilities that most Americans continue to take for granted and made it illegal to just pick up the bones and belongings of long dead people who were here in ancient times.

When people rail about what's wrong with America and talk about the special interests who have ruined the country and radically changed what the founding fathers created as a perfect ideal, what are they really saying?

If you listen to the words of President Johnson from July 2, 1964, they are are speaking out against measures taken as America and its people evolved. Johnson and Congress, both Republicans and Democrats saw that they nation had to evolve. The promise of America had to grow closer to the literal meanings of the Constitution.

If you really think about it, the anger that has built up over 48 years and intensified over the election of a mixed-race president, could be based upon the changes that have occurred in since 1964. People passionate about rolling back the clock recall hearing about how much better things were "in the good old days."

 
The problem with that is context? Who reaped the benefits of a time when so many Americans were considered socially, sexually, racially and physically outside the concerns of a privileged few.