Trying to imagine my parents in today’s world

I miss my parents fiercely, but many days I am glad they are not here to see what this country has become. My dad came home from WWI undamaged, excepted for his lungs because he had been gassed and his psyche just a bit because jet planes later reminded him of incoming bullets--he’d instinctively duck into the nearest building. They had both survived the 1918 flu epidemic and lived through the Depression, WWII, the death of an infant child, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. They were survivors. Like most of us, they were immigrants or nearly so. Dad was Canadian-born and served in the Canadian Army; Mom’s parents were first-generation German. They would have staunchly identified as American and would be heartbroken at what is happening with immigration today.

A preacher’s kid, Dad believed in honesty, integrity, morals, and table manners. He was not a feminist, the only non-liberal attitude I can attribute to him. He always voted for the best man, but we knew the best man without exception was a Democrat. FDR and Churchill were his heroes, and he thought Truman did a great job in difficult circumstances. After that things sort of went downhill, but he admired Kennedy. In Chicago, he voted repeatedly for Mayor Richard Daley, I think on the Machiavellian theory that if the Daley machine was corrupt, it was helping the little people. He was definitely an egalitarian.

He was a news junkie. We knew not to talk during the evening news, when Dad in later years would sit, Scotch in hand, before the TV. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite ruled in our house. We did not have television until Dad bought a very plain one on a rickety stand so he could watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Yes, sigh, I grew up without television.

Mom had studied at the University of Chicago and was secretary to Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, developer of the Great Books Program. She remained a lifelong student, always reading, learning, reaching, and growing. She, too, was a Democrat, though she tended to be less stoic about it than Dad.

One of my first public memories was hearing a woman yelling, “Hooray! Roosevelt is dead!” as she jumped out of a car. I ran in the house to tell Mom, who was quick to tell me to hush and not talk like that. Of course, we later found out it was true.

Mom hated Richard Nixon, absolutely despised him. She violated Dad’s no-talking rule during the news more nights than not. When Nixon would come on, she would proclaim loudly, “He’s a crook. Look at him. You can see it in his eyes.” Her finger would be pointing and shaking. After Nixon disappeared in disgrace and Dad died, she pretty much lost interest in politics. But today she would be shaking her finger and yelling at Trump. The absurdity of his vanity would not get past her either.

Mom and Dad were intellectuals, something not generally in favor in today’s world. Their greatest pleasure of an evening was to sit in their easy chairs, in front of a roaring fire, and read the works of Will and Ariel Durant to each other. There is much about today’s world that would dismay them, including sometimes the behavior of their great-grandchildren—no hats, elbows, or cell phones on the dinner table, please!—but the current administration, the way our country is headed, would dismay them. Then again, they were generally optimistic people of faith who would believe, as I do, that our country will survive (barring nuclear war) and that, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, the pendulum will swing back.