If you’re in the mood for a “Syracuse Journal,” I’ve got one for you, here. I’d like to publish a little mail. Tell a story. And make a point.
In my journal, I show some beautiful old buildings, via photos. One of them is the Syracuse Savings Bank, built next to the Erie Canal in 1875. Another is the Gridley Building, also next to the canal, built in 1867. I comment, “Can they still build ’em like that? If they wanted to, would they know how? (I should say ‘we.’)”
A friend of mine writes,
Can we still build ’em like that? No. We can’t even fix them up.
The church I grew up in, outside Pittsburgh, was built in the late 1800s. Beautiful — but falling apart by the year 2000. The congregation hired experts for an estimate on renovation. Virtually impossible. A good part of the structure rested on oak beams 40 feet long. You could buy land and build three new churches for what the initial estimate said (and the experts said the estimate could be 30 percent low).
A developer was interested in buying the property. His plan was to market it to the National Hockey League, which would then develop a training center for inner-city youth. Anyway, the church was eventually torn down, and there is now a parking lot there.
And now, the above-mentioned story (or rather, another one). I tell it in my Syracuse journal today.
I went into a convenience store, the kind attached to a gas station. There was a sole employee, and he looked very young. “Are you old enough to be working?” I said. “Aren’t there child-labor laws?” The kid asked me to guess his age. I hazarded, “High school?”
He’s 15. Of South Asian background. Speaks with an accent, meaning he was not born here. His father owns the store. The kid has been working all summer and will go back to school in a few days.
That struck me as classically American. Encouragingly so.
Here’s the point I would like to make, and a lot of people won’t like it. I offer it for your consideration. When I was coming of age, I learned conservatism from National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator, etc. (There were a few books thrown in, I assure you.) And conservatives often said the following:
“The economy is not a pie, you know, and neither is society. The world is not zero-sum. If one guy gains, another guy doesn’t necessarily lose. This is the way the Left thinks. They think we’re a pie, and must fight over crumbs. Actually, an economy is as big as free people care to make it, in a dynamic society. Don’t succumb to narrow, ignorant, left-wing thinking. The union bosses have their interests. These interests are not those of society at large.”
Etc., etc.
What is the predominant thinking on the right now? Are many of us newly pie-minded? Are that store-owner and his kid taking away from someone? Are they adding or subtracting? You see what I mean, and this is a big subject, to continue forever, presumably . . .
P.S. I have the theme to The Jeffersons running through my head. Do you remember? “We finally got a piece of the pie.”