I love the term “Middle America.”  It means so much to me ... probably because I was born and raised in just such a social setting.  Middle America is the America belonging to neither the very rich nor the very poor.  I found it easy to be part of a system that does not try to build itself into some kind of overpoweringly rich social phenomenon, but contents itself with the simple but wonderful securities of home, job and family.  And I don’t mean to be anti-poverty either in my designating Middle America as not being part of the world of the very poor.  It’s just that in the world that I grew up in, “poor” would have been a state of mind that I never found to exist in my small-town world.

To be sure, I was not indifferent to the poor ... found mostly in some of the larger cities around us.  I myself eventually served years trying to support and give hope to countless “street people” ... jobless, family-less, and fairly hopeless.  And with respect to the last-mentioned, hopelessness, I did my best to try to show them ways to such hope.  And they loved me for it.  But it was an almost impossible task.  I was well aware of the challenges facing them in their struggles in life.  

In the inner city no one owned their own homes but rented apartments (if they could afford them).  Jobs were available ... but just for those possessing the skills needed for office jobs ... for which my barely literate street guys were in no ways qualified.  Of course there were manual labor jobs available – though not many.  But even these required a certain work-ethic or discipline that my street guys did not possess ... because they had not been brought up in a world of social discipline.  By and large, they never knew their fathers.  And in many cases their mothers were strung out on drugs that public welfare gave them the means to purchase.  No ... this was definitely not Middle America.

But most ironically, all of this helped me come to an even deeper understanding of Middle America, how it is built and why it is so important to America.  In my Middle America, of greatest importance I realized was the family − with father, mother and children living together in a quite positive environment.  The father played the role that all males in the mammal kingdom play, that of protector of the family unit.  And through his job in the community work force, he was also the financial provider, able through his own earnings to give the family all the economic support it needed to live comfortably.  The mother was given the all-critical task of birthing their children, nursing them to health and then supervising their early development ... at least until they headed off to school to continue the learning process.  And she prepared the meals, cleaned the laundry and house itself, to assure a high degree of presentable order to the family.  Then with all the kids in school, she could become more active in community affairs ... helping to keep the family in close harmony with the larger social world.  And then there was church ... Sunday mornings devoted to Sunday school and then church worship ... and probably youth and adult Christian fellowship that same evening.  And afternoon Sunday meals were presented as a special family occasion ... with the fanciest meals prepared in celebration of the family’s togetherness. 

Then there would be higher education for some, although a high school education generally sufficed to ready America’s youths to step into their own family world ... complete with marriage, job, purchase of a house, the birthing of a new generation, etc.  And so Middle America moved ahead, everyone quite structured ... but also quite sovereign in how that life was designed by the American "commoners" themselves ... not by some presiding political authority.

So what happened to Middle America?  This is not yet the time or place for me to go into detail as to what happened.  But I can summarize things in pointing out that deep social changes – a social "revolution" actually – hit America deeply in the 1960s, beginning a process by which Middle America was purposely disassembled because it did not conform to a whole new set of social ideals.  For instance, thanks to Betty Friedan’s 1963 hugely best-seller book, The Femanine Mystique, a rapidly rising spirit of feminism tended to portray marriage as being something of a male-dominated trap ... a trap that women needed to be freed from so that they could follow their own professional careers outside the home.  And President Johnson’s Great Society Program was introduced in 1964 to help the poor (especially if they were Black) out of their poverty.  But instead, the program simply kept them there, dependent on the trickle of funds sent by the federal government to poor "families" ... provided that no employable male was present in that family institution.  Thus for multiple reasons, marriage as an institution broke down, an increasing number of children were raised fatherless, a huge drop occurred in the nation's net reproduction rate (only 1.64 births per woman instead of the required 2.1 rate needed to sustain a population), the nation's wealth began to slip from the hands of Middle Americans into the hands of a small group of multi-millionaires and even billionaires, and activities that would never have been thought to be a good way of going at life now became not only acceptable, but beyond criticism (criticism now even punishable under new laws).  And the national government at this point has no idea how to stop, much less reverse, this downward trend of Middle America.  Or maybe it doesn't even want to.

But interestingly, some 50 years after this social "revolution," a large number of America’s youth (Gen-Z) are making personal decisions to try to get their lives back in line with America’s long-standing Middle America program.  Let’s hope they succeed.  It was, after all, Middle America that brought America to success – becoming even a superpower − by the beginning of the 1960s ... just prior to this disastrous social-moral "revolution."  And it is only by once again going down the road of "Middle America" that there is any hope of our society being able to stop the downward trend of any society that forgets what it was that brought it to greatness.  As history reveals repeatedly, foolishly taking on new, untested social ways inevitably produces moral-spiritual confusion ... which in turn produces social, economic and political confusion – the kind that America finds itself caught in today.  So ... Gen-Z, I'm with you all the way.  Bring us back to the true social greatness found in Middle American life! That is, after all, exactly how God himself wanted to see us Americans go at life.

Miles Hodges is a writer, historian and political analyst who explores the question of why societies behave as they do ... especially in this matter of their rise and fall.