We have many regular and faithful readers of these weekly editorials. We know this because we are told so in the grocery store checkout line, on errands to the hardware store and in impromptu sidewalk critique sessions. We receive lots of encouragement and are gently told sometimes to tone down the sermonizing. These conversations are our best rewards.
After all these years, our most faithful reader has been lost to us. Our mother, Kathryn Harding Miller died Jan. 12. Her life is important to our fellow readers because it was her example and influence that most shaped the views and values that have been the core of every sermonet, diatribe or dissent written here.
While her influence will live on in these weekly writings, the era and experiences of her life and an earlier American generation continue to fade fast from all of us. We don’t need so much to mourn for her as we do for ourselves, which is something else she has taught us.
We called our mother “Toots,” her childhood nickname. She was born in 1931 to struggling working class parents during the Great Depression. She became a professional working woman, self-made, proud, protective, stubborn (defiant), sparkling and smart. She measured all of her 85 years of accomplishments as being a mother.
Her hard scrapple upbringing, years of climbing social barriers as a working mother and the wider experiences of witnessing a world war, the first space exploration, three American political assassinations and the unhappy dissolve of an older century into this 21st are all experiences that were instilled here in these weekly writings.
Delivered from those lodestars readers have found here a staunch foundation of economic conservatism, rooted in a “Waste not, want not” Depression era mentality. Also encountered here has been a wide patch of social liberalism, informed by eyewitness accounts of raw racial prejudice, gender, income and social class discrimination and the murderous hypocrisies of the Vietnam War era.
Our editorials (sermonets) over the past several decades have championed frugal, common sense government and gave favor to working families like our farmers, teachers and tradesmen. We always have endorsed inclusive social policies for people of all colors and economic backgrounds. We have angrily denounced all wars and the weaponry that feeds both domestic violence and endless super power crusades.
These and other views and values were born in times very unlike our 21st Century, times where Toots listened to Elvis, sewed her daughters’ dresses and commanded us to “Mind our Ps and Qs.” What are the lessons and legacies today’s mothers may be passing on to their children, those who may write future editorials, lead government or be their own professional woman? We wonder if a mother’s lesson carries the same gravity it once did. Today, there are so many more social or anti-social signals, pretend morals and counter-influences.
From here on, where will we learn our values about good manners, true conservatism or the real principles of a great America? As bleak as the Great Depression, World War II, the War on Poverty and the anti-war and civil rights violence of the 1960s might have been, today’s world just seems much messier and distraught.
Our mother, Toots, died quietly and peacefully enough. She just got too tired — but she also professed to becoming very angry.
In her final years Toots kept up a constant quarrel with the world (except for her children.) She couldn’t watch TV anymore; all she could do was cuss at it. No one dared mention Trump in front of her. One final blessing for her may have been that she died a week before Trump’s inauguration. At least that’s what one of her relatives said at her burial.
– Rollie Atkinson
