While doing Genealogy I have come to realize that my generation must be the luckiest ever born for my family suffered on the low end of Society for at least the last three hundred years. There were many branches of the Family Tree that go back to Ireland were they were probably Tenant Farmers living at the whim of their lord. Some moved on to Scotland to work in the factories and mills. There is plenty of evidence that until the latter part of the ninth century many of them couldn’t read or write signing their marriage certificates with an X. at least on my father’s side I think my grandparents were the first one to go to school for it wasn’t considered necessary for poor laborers to be educated until factory owners need them to be more skilled. Even after they were sent to school most only went to school until they were fourteen reporting the next day to the factories, mills or mines. My Mother told me that she left school at nine years old first working in the fields picking strawberries then in the wool mills of Alva Scotland. When she was about twenty years old her mother arranged for her and two of her cousins go to New York. The year was 1929 so they left one depression for another. They worked as Maids in Brooklyn, her two cousins getting home sick went back to Scotland. My mother stayed only because she met my father who had just arrived in New York himself. My Dad left Scotland because he was an Irish Catholic in a country that hated both and let my father know it. My brother, sister and me have had it easy compared to the generations just before us and I am sure the whole family hopes for a even better future.
I think most work class people have similar stories one generation trying to improve the lot of the next and our generation. Certainly we lived through best economic times due to the “cold war” and the industrial complex built up since just before World War Two. Now since the beginning of our nation the wealthier class has tried to keep the lower classes in check feeding them just enough to keep them quiet. We have been feed well enough in my life time to make a lot of people think they are middle class, but that was by exploiting working class people in other nations. The improvement in commutations first with Radio, then with Television and now with the Internet it is getting hard for the upper classes to control the information flow between the working people of the world. It is always hard to forecast the future, but if history teaches us anything it is that the lot of common people is very slowly getting better. It may not seem like at any one moment in time, but the working people of the world are more aware today than they ever were, they only have to listen to all points
