Something I have always said about low wage workers

[electric_blue68]

35. That seems a rather insulting comment; it may not be quite as she puts but yours is also...

somewhat of an over generalization.

See my post #31
FDR's Economic (2nd);Bill of Rights.
.
Thinking about the 1 example I know from being alive & cogent at those times back then, and the other by historical knowledge that sometimes great pain; physical, mental, emotional/psychological can bring about a great change in a person's thinking. Especially one who has been born to privilege.

Historical
FDR. Living through the times he did, and stricken by polio (since I've never read a biography on him) how did he come to be more of a champion for workers? Luckily, too, he had First Lady Eleanor to nudge him as well.
Look at his Economic (2nd) Bill of Rights
Does that sound like lazarie faire capitalism to you? Do that sound roughshard to you?


Personal and Historical
I was a baby more or less when the McCarthy Hearings happened. I do know my folks watched, or heard (radio) about them. Both my parents were liberals here in NYC. But being by say, 12 years old or so early-mid '60s I began to hear about them, and how terrible they were.

And we see it reflected even today especially either by educational knowledge as I learned, or by some of our DU'rs who remember it from experiencing it - and have "said to" Drumpf, and his cohorts, enablers, apologists etc "have you no shame?" The words that finally deflated McCarthy.

The personal intersects the historical as I started to follow my first Presidential Election: 1968.

I love/d TV, but I also have a thing for radio for music, and musings Later at night I found this talker (after Jean Shepard) - Barry Gray sometime in mid-late 1967. He started (or had had on before I listened) many of JFK's former people, and for eventually Bobby Kennedy a very young then Jeff Greenfield. I was 7 in '60, and I remember asking my older relatives who they were going to vote for. That might have been my first political question! And I was 9 for the Cuban Missle Crisis, smart enough to know what could happen, 10 in '63. So there was that.

So they were discussing - would RFK run for President?

Here was someone born to privilege, yet knowing the pain of losing the eldest brother although what he knew of him in a large family like that in such an age range, I don't know.

He also it turns out was a gentle soul that his father hated. So he hid it, and toughened up. I know my mom watched The McCarthy Hearings from earlier conversation, but she also said to me as either as people speculated about him, or when he started to run, "He's changed.".

The searing wound of losing JFK, and perhaps his father stricken speechless through a stroke somehow reopened that locked away empathy, and gentleness that people saw as he began to campaign. He brought working men and women, intellectuals, creatives, black, and white, Hugo Cheavez and the grape pickers (who also symbolized more immigrants of color, plus the younger of theirs born citizens), Native Americans, some of the Anti-War protestors etc together that we might have walked together. Perhaps in another timeline, or a parallel Earth that some respected physisists say might exist.


So these things, these events, our personal, and sometimes collective histories are, perhaps, more complicated, and sometimes more simple, more nuanced than they appear. Sometimes it's hard to know.
Sometimes we can, ?must ponder if we can.