Like many students, I was born in 1992, a year of turning points for history. Yugoslavia began to dissolve, “The Silence of the Lambs” became the first horror film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and a Canadian baseball team won the World Series. Most famously perhaps, it was the year that brought the formal end of the Cold War.
While I may not remember these events, reading about them today is as easy as a few strokes of my keyboard. They fill the pages of Wikipedia and of books written and yet to be written. “Events” like these are the points of familiar knowledge unfamiliar people share; they remind us what page of history we’re on and inform our sense of the world.
We gain much through this version of history, but do we lose anything in the process?
Taking a break from work for a few days this past winter break, I decided to re-explore the Pennsylvanian town my family originally hails from. My great-grandfather had traveled here from the Austrian partition of Poland at the turn of the 20th century, and after a period in the coal mines, had opened up a grocery store that pushed his family into the middle class.
As I walked through the city, however, I wondered if it would be recognizable to him today. Here, the median household income hasn’t broken $38,000 in recent memory, and the poverty line hasn’t budged below 20 percent either. I pondered what the stories here would be if they made it into the newspapers:
“Boy joins one in three metro area children living in poverty”; “Middle-aged mother still working for minimum wage”; “Another student drops college as tuition hikes continue.”
For everyone from similar towns, these situations hold little shock value. Examples of how our growing economy is failing to deliver its benefits to the bulk of citizens are increasingly commonplace. They are representative of how the historical bargain with the American middle-class — that if you work hard, you will earn a decent living — has been broken.
For these people, there was no attention-grabbing historical event that has gripped America with their growing struggle. The middle class is not going out with a bang but a forced squeeze, and there are no clear and compelling “events” like the success of Sputnik that spurred education reform or the 9/11 attacks that yielded homeland security measures. How do we motivate ourselves to care and respond?
I believe we must listen to the other narratives of history that elude our typical news sources: the experiences of the ordinary people who live it. To begin expanding rather than restricting the American Dream, we must shed light and value beyond the events of our institutions onto the lives of those who work inside them. And here, few things in our culture, whether popular or political, can guide us. Instead, the other common points in life we share — love of family, support of friends, hope for a better life — can give us a cause to remember that we are not only living but writing this page of history together.
