Looking back at our lifetimes of doing what we could
We played that funky music (that was the name of a song), wondered about Jimmy Carter (he was the man of the hour), worried about inflation (it was over 5 percent, and heading higher). We didn’t think much about the stock market (the Dow hovered around 1,000) nor about the price of gasoline (it was 59 cents a gallon, more or less). We actually thought that more, not less, was our birthright. It was a long time ago.
This week I am heading to my college reunion, full of thoughts about the world we helped make, and whether we made a hash of it all after complaining so much about the world we inherited, which looks pretty darn good at the distance of four decades.
We left our leafy campus four decades ago for a world pockmarked by Watergate, but still full of promise. Americans flew into space; Eastern and Western airlines flew their routes; and our dreams still took flight.
Among those graduating in our year across the country were Yo Yo Ma, whose music is ageless; Cameron Munter, U.S. ambassador in Pakistan during the Osama bin Laden killing; Sonia Sotomayor, who sits with another one of us, John G. Roberts Jr., on the Supreme Court; Jill Abramson, who was executive editor of The New York Times; and Louise Erdrich, who brought Native American life alive for millions beyond her Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
There were captains of commerce, such as John P. Surma, who headed the United States Steel Corp.; and political figures like Tom Price, who now heads the Department of Health and Human Services; and sports figures like Steve Largent, who belonged to the House of Representatives and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and Reggie Williams, who served on the Cincinnati City Council and was both the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year and Sports Illustrated’s Co-Sportsperson of the Year.
There were three dozen Army generals. And then there were the rest of us, who simply went to work, maybe had kids, probably made a contribution to our communities, and now keep an eye on the future of Medicare.
“My parents drilled into me that I came from a poor family and maybe was not the smartest guy, but if I got to work early and did the right thing, I could succeed,” Surma, the U.S. Steel chief, said. Parents still tell this to their children. In our time, it was possible.
Like college graduates before and after us, we set out to change the world, though for our parents the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor changed the world for them, just as the Great Recession and Sept. 11 changed the world for our children.
In the end, most of us had to find contentment in small changes around the edges. The changes we won in domestic policy were often in our own domiciles.
For all of us, the story is mixed. What did we do, what did we become? Not as much as we hoped, to be sure. Not as selfless as we should have been, almost certainly. Not as creative as we could have been, no question.
We inherited a world we considered thoughtlessly materialistic and overly commercial, and we made it worse, on both accounts.
We considered ourselves hopeless idealists and became haplessly practical.
But whether retired or still at our work stations, we still are in the fight — to preserve the values we were taught in college, to produce a country worthy of the love we have devoted to it, and to continue to open our society and culture ever wider.
“Society is like this card game here, cousin,” Erdrich wrote in “Love Medicine,” perhaps her best-loved novel. “We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.”
We are playing as best as we can, still, four decades after graduation — the day we got our degree even as it was the day we began our education.