Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THEY are the descendants of Jacksonian America. Once they were the heroes of the American democratic my thology. Walt Whitman catalogued them. Carl Sandburg cel ebrated them. "The people will live on," he wrote - mean ing the workers, the "common man" in a slightly nostalgic sense, the people nowadays referred to as the lower middle class. The traditional American values and ambitions sus tained them. Today, those virtues seem to many to be mocked and perverted. The white lower middle class feels dan gerously ignored, as outdated as Norman Rockwell's folksy icons. With justice, Richard Nixon calls them...
...challenge lies in the fact that lower-middle-class whites and blacks actually share quite similar economic needs: better jobs, better schools, better services, better police protection, relief from taxes. Ideally, they should band to gether, employing their collective economic and political strength to advance their common interests. Is this Utopian...
...were false to the extent that the wealthier whites were per forming acts of noblesse oblige that infuriated the white lower middle class and often the blacks themselves. Now the Philadelphia Antipoverty Action Committee has dis covered that black-white alliances are possible where racial neighborhoods adjoin and share common dangers and demands. Thus, black and white parents last year formed a community-action committee that preserved GET SET, a pre school program that both groups felt their children urgently needed...
...across the continent are beginning to employ old dance forms and chants. In Zambia, even the tribal lamentations at the bedside of the dying are being reintroduced. Vernacular masses can be found almost everywhere, and native drums, long used to call the faithful to church, are now a common part of many religious services. Though not all. Complained one Ugandan: "It sounds too much like a beer party...
Whatever it is that makes a man suddenly stand and challenge the rules of his society, risking everything he has secured for himself, has been a classic inquiry through all literature, but it is particularly relevant for America today. The common fury in the hearts of the disenchanted can extend beyond Black Power and campus rebellion into suburbia, and farther. In David Shetzline's second novel, that rage explodes during a forest fire in the timber country of Oregon. Before the fire is smothered by a snowstorm, it has scorched the lives of several middle-aged American males...