My dad was born an East Texas dirt farmer in 1936, my mom at the start of the Baby Boom in 1944, so I was raised hearing how they were raised. My dad told me his dad once found one of his hogs butchered but did not report it, because he knew his brother did it for food and people got loooong prison sentences for that during the Depression. He also told me his dad used to buy a box of .22 shells and bring back a squirrel with every last one, because shells cost money they could not spare.

My mom told me that, for years, her mom had to sit on her dads hands when she woke him, because he had been trained to come out of sleep fighting during WWII. He never talked about the war unless very drunk, when the images of faces on trains he had strafed and bombed came back to haunt a man who had been a choir boy with ambitions for the priesthood. Yet we were at war, so he rejected his full MIT scholarship to lie about his age and enlist. After the war he used to hitchhike to the union job that bought the house where my mom and all her siblings were raised, but by the time he retired from the docks he had earned enough to pay off my moms house and each of her brothers'. My parents bought the house I was born in, and the other two in which I grew up, thanks to VA financing through the GI Bill.

The New Deal did good by us, saved us from the Depression, won WWII, rebuilt post-war Europe and culminated in putting a man on the moon. Then Nixon and Reagan came along and the whole thing went to Hell: I can think of no significant US accomplishment since that moon landing 43 years ago. After trickle down economics brought America, the world, to its knees, the New Deal brought us roaring back with 40 years of uninterrupted improvement, progress and higher living standards; since we began abandoning it with our departure from the gold standard in 1973, we have experienced NOTHING but decline, except for a brief period of stability when we treaded water under Clinton.

Strictly speaking, I was born about a year after Nixon brought the New Deal and 40 years of uninterrupted staggering American achievement to a screeching halt, and since that day about two weeks after Ford replaced the resigning president, have witnessed nothing but 40 years of uninterrupted American decline. So, yes, the New Deal shapes me worldview very much, because I know what it gave us and what we lost when we lost it. It made us a world power, and its abandonment threatens to remove that status.

Sorry for the length; it is hard to compress nearly 38 years of life and what my parents told me of theirs into just a few paragraphs.


Actually, the above comments cover that pretty well. You can throw in the Great Society for good measure; my mom also told me her moms dad was killed by a bloodclot easily treated by medicine he could not afford, about a year before LBJ enacted Medicaid, so abolishing it and Medicare threatens me, you and every American. Sending American production and jobs to our greatest remaining foe while demanding millionaire tax cuts that bankrupt the nation hurts all of us. Including them, were they not too myopic to see it; I hope for their sake they are converting those ill-gotten gains into gold or yuan, because when the American dollar is worthless it will not matter how many they managed to steal.