Working class Americans are not “dumb”
but simply “dumbed down” by all the propaganda
aimed at keeping most of us from the truth.
Walter Petrovich 1927–2009

…………
Just before midnight on April 15th, the guidance that sustained our lives, enabled our voices, synchronized our hearts, and crafted our visions stopped abruptly and without warning in the untimely passing of my father-in-law, Walter Petrovich.

He was a kind and gentle soul who took the time to talk through any issue you’d present. Open and honest, he encouraged interaction. In return, he demanded only one thing: That you step back and observe the larger picture, because only then would you be able to see the truth.

A scholar of political and social history, Walter inspired not only those around him but also those who read his masterfully crafted essays which he produced up until the day he died. In a November 2007 column entitled “I’ll take Public Education for $500, Alex”, I said of Walter:

Recently, my husband and I celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary—although he likes to tell everyone he’s been happily married for 10 years…and not in a row. Some wives might have trouble with that assessment. But I think it is fair—especially considering the fact that when we married—only one of us had chin hair.

What caught me by surprise was that after the wedding, I was immediately deployed to my father-in-law’s political boot camp, a rugged, in-your-face training facility—from which there was no escape—and where inductees were obligated to learn the depth and gravity of society’s issues and the resultant impact on the welfare of mankind.
Oh boy.

It is one thing to plan a wedding, a life together as husband and wife, but quite another to be held captive in a never-ending forum of systemically-examined social, political, and economic education.

What the hell had I gotten myself into? The marriage I could handle…but this?

Step aside Bob Eubanks. This was not going to be The Newlywed Game.

Over the next two and a half decades there was never an occasion—a holiday, celebration, or meal—at my in-law’s where macro-socio-economic conversation wasn’t front and center and thoroughly analyzed. Time and again—in between bites of food, choruses of Happy Birthday, and spontaneously shouted responses to Wheel of Fortune—we were relegated to consider contemplative answers to political decisions made by our (elected?) officials—and more importantly—how they impacted the masses, commonly known as We The People.

For most of those exchanges, I would sit politely and nod my head (as if) in agreement. In general, I felt that I had little standing on which to disagree, let alone voice an opinion. This stuff (so I thought) was way over my head, not merely because I often have trouble working the toaster, but also because my only previous political education was in November of 1963 when, at the tender age of seven, I overheard a paternal relative discussing President Kennedy’s assassination by commenting, “I’ll bet the media will flog this for days.”

(Note: That observation proved wrong. The media has been flogging it for decades).

My father-in-law’s discussions were nothing if not passionate, and were primarily focused on social ills that revolved around the relationship of labor, worker’s rights, class struggles, and economic conflicts. In order to make his point, he would recite the words of Abraham Lincoln: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Labor can exist without capital, but capital cannot exist without labor.”

It was this potholed relationship, the exploitation of labor under our system of capitalism, which consumed most of his discussions. He believed in an economic democracy that “codifies the rights of all people to have a direct vote in all matters which affect our lives” by reminding us that the literal meaning of democracy is People (demos) having Power (cracy).

To wit, a sampling of Walter Petrovich’s observations from his invaluable archive:

May 1968
“Sir Julian Huxley, renowned biologist and evolutionist, reports in Man and the Modern World, that war (as opposed to food-gathering struggles) exists only among two of the tens of thousands of species known to science: man and the harvester ants. Not men in general but men in property society. To many men in primitive society, the idea of war is incomprehensible.”

September 1974
“As American workers, in all fields, we must awaken, search out new and better ways to live and work together in society, and we must do it soon or else we will leave this land a chaotic hell for our children—a hell in which capitalist owners still reign supreme.” (Note: Fast forward to today!)

February 1975
“Industries which are run socially, that is, by the cooperation of millions of workers, are owned and controlled privately by a small minority of capitalists. (This) ‘Social production’ logically should mean social ownership and producing goods and services needed for our own homes, families, and communities. But under capitalism the logical gives way to the insane wherein when we produce too much, we get rewarded by being laid off.”

December 2005
“The (capitalist) system is irrational so how can we expect its supporters and beneficiaries to make any sense? No egalitarian society would tolerate poverty amidst plenty, wars for private plunder, actors for president, and uneducated weight lifters as governors, rather it would promote working farmers, wage workers, professionals, menial labor tasks, housewives, the art communities, all who represent a viable segment of our total society. It would not marginalize…it would embrace.

January 2007
“A studied reflection on what is at the core of the social turmoil we call poverty, crime, racism, the environmental, and the vicious divisions in government, can be narrowed to one, and only one cause: the structure and use of our economy. It should be clear to everyone by now that the present system has failed to service a consistently prosperous, peaceful and harmonious society. In fact, the opposite is quite true.”

Amen.

Rest in Peace Walter Petrovich

Lynn M. Petrovich
Copyright 2009

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