February 2, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

“Progress” is relative in any age, in any place, with any people. The discovery of fire almost two million years ago was movement forward, bringing warmth, lighting, cooking, protection, etc., which in turn pushed human evolution. We are still at it, this “progress,” and it remains relative. It depends on who is making the definition.

Growing up in the 1940s into the early ’50s, my sacrificing parents, both working to keep all afloat, entered the middle class. Children of the Great Depression, and in my mother’s case, living for a time in an orphanage, and then enduring wartime restrictions, they knew hard work from their teens. Like most of their generation. Soon enough, their focus was on my brother and me, and as with so many living post-war, the jobs created first by World War II production and then in the expansion of the U.S. economy, they worked their way into the bottom of the middle class. That helped set up their children for a future more secure than their own. Progress.

My parents bought a home after years of renting. They saved a bit in the bank. They purchased a new car and household goods, which spurred production and created jobs. And also profit for business that paid a fair share of taxes. A circle of “progress.” They voted for leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, the wartime general who hated war, who sought, under a then progressive platform, to build the middle class. In fact, a tenet of the 1956 Republican platform was “America does not prosper unless all Americans prosper.”

That was progress, mid-1950s, relative to that time. The ensuing influences in successive decades of stubborn poverty, racism, urban decay, rising government costs, reduced taxation for an emerging ultra-rich class, hidden, selfish special interests and the “military/industrial complex” that Ike warned us about in his farewell address, plus other influences, have thwarted progress ever since.

What my parents, of limited circumstance and truly hard work, could accomplish because of enlightened government, with two-party give and take, seems increasingly at risk today. Those in power who promise “progress” use that term relatively. It appears not the progress of early post-war but of special interest – “progress” for some; for others, much less, if any gain.

People without work; higher health care-costs and rising food prices; substance abuse; enabled prejudice of race and gender; hidden special-interest money unduly influencing elections; a disappearing investigative/watchdog media – all block “progress.” Some of these influences are deliberate. Increasingly.

The 1956 GOP platform stated, “We shall ever build anew, that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land. We believe that basic to governmental integrity are unimpeachable ethical standards and irreproachable personal conduct by all people in government.”

“Progress” then. Relative to today. And now the middle-class ladder seems broken. Deliberately.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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