I didn't know that I lived in middle America in the 1950s and 1960s. I thought everyone had a Ford Country Squire station wagon, a lawn mower, and a house with four bedrooms and a fireplace. My parents emigrated from Belgium on the Queen Elizabeth in 1948 three years after the Nazis were defeated. My father worked for an import-export company and my mother stayed home and raised six children.
My sisters, brothers and I watched Lassie on television, drank Ovaltine, made Kool-Aid, swam in the local pool, played Monopoly and bought Good Humor ice-pops. Middle school was all about English class and dodgeball, spelling lessons, social dancing and the first kiss.
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The soundtrack in high school was the Beatles and Supremes, and Charlie Brown and Snoopy were on the cover of Life magazine.
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Life in the middle was ordinary, safe, inexpensive, and where a boy read The Hardy Boys books in bed before going to sleep, and a girl listened to Cousin Brucie and the top-10 songs on her transistor radio.
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Living in the middle for children during those halcyon days was living in a bubble. I wasn't much aware of the Vietnam War. Woodstock became famous years after the last act left the sage. I was stunned as a 12-year-old boy while I watched the funeral of President John F. Kennedy on television as his son saluted the passing casket. But children in the middle were spared hunger, violence and chaos, and civil rights were a distant cry for help. For 18 years of my life, dinner was served each night, homework was finished before zooming off on my Schwinn bicycle with that headlight I still fondly remember. Summers were for swimming and winters for skating out back at the swamp where the big boys played hockey and the kids zoomed back and forth over the ice pretending we were Olympic stars. I was proud that I could actually skate backward.
A peach has a pit. The earth has a core. Bridges have struts and cables. The middle of a structure needs a center to hold it together. If the middle collapses, both sides cave into dust.
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William Butler Yeats, the author of the universally famous poem "The Second Coming," knew, following World War I, that chaos, pain, slaughter and confusion nearly destroyed what we have come to know as social stability. A boy cannot read The Hardy Boys books in bed if there are bombs falling from the sky and if bayonets are piercing the front door. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," Yeats wrote.
When anarchy is loosed upon the world, Yeats lamented, innocence is drowned. No more ice cream for children. No more Lassie and dinners and school bells and summers at the beach.
When we lose the courage of faith, hard work, kindness and compassion, when we lose the stability of the center, we seek a renewal and a savior. We seek salvation. That is what happened in Germany after World War I. The center of the German society was destroyed and in the vacuum, Adolf Hitler and his thugs filled the void, promising to rebuild the middle, but what rose up from the ashes instead, as Yeats wrote, was a beast that crawled out from the sand in "a shape with lion body and the head of a man," and with such false hope, darkness descended into World War II and into the gas chambers of the swastika.
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America is at a crossroads. Darkness looms over the communities of middle America. Build the center and the edges seep in and we all become stronger; break up the center with racism, antisemitism, ignorance and greed, and the center implodes, dragging the whole into the abyss.
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We have a clear choice in this November election. Do we choose thugs or do we choose wisdom? On our way to the polls, do we slouch toward Bethlehem or do we dance? The center must hold.
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