A Bourgeois Beginning

Recently I discovered some pages from a journal I intended to keep for my first child.  On the one hand, knowing now what was to come, they seem sad.  But on the other hand, they are an honest reflection of what I was feeling those last heady weeks before Morgan was born.  And, perhaps, there is message for my other daughters. . . or not.  Who knows.

September 7, 1979

My Dear Child,
I am endeavoring to keep this journal for you, that someday you may read it and experience your youth from my perspective as your father.  As much of our childhood as is retained (albeit in our unconscious, very often) just as much is lost from us.  Of my own past I know not as much as I would like.  About my parents, your Grandparents, there are mysteries only hinted at and never made clear to me.
But this is a book for you, not necessarily for me, yet I must begin with our past - yours and mine.  Our name is French and in the form BOUTILLIER was granted to our family in 1593, in Lorraine.  Tradition has it that our family were Huguenots - French Protestants and were expelled from France for that belief. However, another story claims we were given land in New France for helping Napoleon, the latter is rather suspect, as Canada was controlled by Great Britain at the time.  In any case, the family settled in the St. John valley and adjacent Aroostook county - as did the Bakers and Lovelys, your Grandmother's family.
The significance of all this lies in our bourgeois background.  Huguenots were traders and merchants - entrepreneurs who built and strengthened the capitalist system.  There lie our roots in a revolutionary class and we must be proud of that.  We are and always have been of the middle class and can do not otherwise, I fear.  

What makes me sad about this passage is the comment about not knowing, or better - remembering, my own past.  This is true.  It is amazing to me when I get with my sisters and they remember so much about our growing up. . . . I remember very little.  What amuses me is the statement about being of a 'revolutionary class'.  I was being very specific concerning that reference and it demonstrates, I think, an understanding of the role of classes in history beyond the typical characterization of 'bourgeois' as stupid or boring, or anti-revolutionary.  However, it may also have been a recognition that we are what we are and that I was always going to be the middle class son of middle class parents.  We were not going to ever be proletarian, working class in the revolutionary sense that the bourgeois were revolutionary in contrast to feudalism.  But then again, neither was Lenin or Marx.

And now the rallying cry is not "Workers of the World Unite", it is "Save the Middle Class".  What we took for granted 30 years ago seems like a dream today; that an education and hard work could create a secure world to live in.  At the time, I assumed we had a choice which side of history we would fall on, I am not so sure my children feel that freedom to chose between being middle class and working class.  One small step, one missed payment, one lay off and they are in danger of tumbling down into the pit from which it takes generations to claw your way out of.

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