Many of my ‘Boomer’ generation will fondly remember the iconic magazine art produced by the gifted American Illustrator, Norman Rockwell, whose imaginative Saturday Evening Post covers captured the quintessence of American life during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I grew up at the tail end of Norman Rockwell’s America, a world which has long since evaporated into the mists of our nation’s social history. And while it wasn’t a perfect world it was nevertheless a time of relatively stable family life and national cohesion. In that society men worked hard in the mills and factories while wives and mothers anchored their families and neighborhoods by their at-home presence. Neighborhoods were true neighborhoods, not cookie cutter subdivisions or gated compounds. Over 90 kids lived on my block alone. We all played (and fought) together, walked in batches to school, or sneaked off to the nearby drug store soda font. Small independent ‘AG’ grocers and butchers within easy walking distance dotted the landscape. At dinnertime a mass migration ensued, each to his or her own home for the family supper.

Though we didn’t realize it at the time, it was the end of an era. America reigned as the world’s industrial power. We produced goods and services on a scale never before imagined in human history. But dark forces were already at work in the higher echelons of corporate and governmental power, forces bent on subjecting ordinary Americans to mass mind control techniques intended to enrich and empower a few at the expense of the many. The purpose of this covert social engineering experiment was to re-wire our brains and emotions and root out that annoying American trait of ‘individualism’ which was grounded in the nuclear family. Therefore the family, long the primary unit of social unity and moral authority, was to be gradually edged out of its vaunted position by a gaggle of ‘expert authorities’ in government and education. The large private corporations cooperated in this transfer of power away from the family unit by undermining the economic independence of individuals, especially fathers, and reducing workers to dependent wage slaves.

Thus World War II became a kind of benchmark after which we were no longer truly free and sovereign citizens but rather unwitting captive specimens in a nation-wide social science laboratory. And so we ‘Boomers’ were raised and educated in an increasingly corporate dominated ‘collectivist’ social framework where enterprise and independent thought were being slowly but surely squeezed out by a new ethos based upon institutional conformity. ‘Company men’ and ‘team players’ became the new social and economic paradigm supplanting the former ‘independent farmer’ mindset. In fact, the self sufficient family farm itself was in free-fall by 1950 alongside countless rural communities withering on the vine.