The bleached out blue collar began with the hard hats against the anti-war protestors in the late ‘60s. The blue collar then with their relatively high pay displaced the issue of the economy and turned to cultural issues which at the time were the effeminate flower children and draft dodgers, together with Vietnam veterans such as Kerry who was judged as disrupting Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war. Though many of these hard hats were union, they were willing to cut off their nose to spite their face by going against their own organization concerned only with bread and butter issues.
Out of this chaos of the war sprung other issues such as civil rights; the white male blue collar workers were not shy in expressing peripheral values and most particularly quotas that threatened the lock they had on their jobs. The transition from New Dealers to Reagan Democrats was easy for these tough-minded individualists to forget whence they came — unions that earned them good pay with fringes, and the G.I. Bill which facilitated home ownership and training in their trades. Still frothing at the mouth over the flower children and the despicable new left presumed to be on drugs, the blue collars faded in the turmoil of the wash and starched their work shirts with stiff opposition to anything liberal. Soon blue collar Catholics, oblivious to their own origins of fighting against prejudice, absconded from left of center what once was private family beliefs to the evangelical public arena of moral issues. Meanwhile the blue collars were so faded that they were indistinguishable from the white collars of Wall Street. Thoroughly scrubbed by the new adoptive party, the blue collars reached the cycle of no return — so washed out that “values” were more important than daily bread.
Not until now, and then only limited to the so-called swing states where the economy is down the tubes, can you hear the cries out of the contented middle class workers of the past. It is but an echo in the wilderness which rebounds with the ugly truth: too late, the true blue has faded away.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 13, 2004.
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