My grandad's house. It looked much better in his time.

For the past couple of years I've confined my Internet musings to either my podcast or, realizing even 140 characters might be more of my company than most can stomach, Twitter. Finally I had some thoughts that didn't fit in either of those formats, so I'm taking the Wayback machine to 2008 when I used to post here several times a week.

You have to wonder if it's not only the soldiers we should be memorializing today.

Around the 24th of May every year I make a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. My mother died just before Memorial Day in 2009 so I drive to Chattanooga to visit my parents' resting place in the town where they were born.

The past couple of trips I've also driven to the neighborhood where my aunt and uncle and grandmother and grandad, who are also all gone, lived from the end of the `70's to the mid-`90's. The neighborhood is now mostly African-American; the majority of the houses are run down and have bars on the windows and doors. But in my nostalgia I half expect to see my uncle washing his MG in the driveway, and to walk in my grandad's house and see him and my grandmother on the couch among a nest of Chattanooga Times-Free Press newspapers and National Enquirers watching golf. (Even before the Golf Channel, my grandparents could somehow find a golf game on a UHF channel any time of day or night.)

Each visit I've taken out my camcorder to try to capture the experience of driving up to their houses as I remember it when I was a kid. Then I'll notice a current resident out in their driveway or yard taking note of my activities. Given that, as I mentioned before, there are now bars on the windows and doors of most of these houses, they probably think I'm either a narc or a burglar casing the neighborhood.

So I stopped to explain to the elderly black gentleman who now owns my grandad's old house that my grandad had lived there, and my uncle lived across the street. Somehow the ensuing conversation wound around to the man's previous employment as a labor union representative.

He told me that the new Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, a United Auto Workers job, pays...well, let's pause here. UAW? An automotive union job? Hmm, let's see. $30 an hour? $40? Surely those union guys are lighting cigars on $100 bills and buying rounds of Grey Goose for their pals on Saturday night, right?

The top pay on the assembly line is $12 an hour. Repeat: the TOP pay. $12. Some jobs are paying as little as $8.

My grandad and uncle, both welders, were members of the Boilermakers union. Grandad grew up sharecropping, leaving school in 6th grade and coming to Chattanooga from Alabama when he was 18 to be trained in welding by Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority. One welder's paycheck pulled the weight of a wife and four kids. Grandad owned his home, as well as two others that he rented out. Every three to five years he would buy a brand new car. And they were among the first on their street to own a TV set. As for my uncle, his paycheck covered a wife and three kids, and one of my cousins once said, "Going to Uncle Max's house is like going to Circuit City!" In the `80's Uncle Max had one of those full-size NASA style TV dishes in the back yard, and always the latest model of VCR, stereo receiver and projection screen TV. Welders!

But for any man in Chattanooga today, even one who may have a college degree, this is what he's looking at: $12 an hour. On the high side. I can imagine my grandad and uncle would've been first in line for a good United Auto Workers job a few decades ago, but there wouldn't be any houses, new cars or satellite dishes to look forward to today. In fact, the pay would be so bad it might make sharecropping look tempting again.

Driving around Chattanooga, I also couldn't help noticing the closed storefronts and lack of traffic on the road on a sunny spring Saturday. No one heading out to keep the local economy afloat with their week's earnings.

So on this Memorial Day you have to wonder if not only the soldiers have passed, but so did the kind of America they fought for.

* I should've mentioned, my uncle dropped out of high school to get married shortly before he was to have graduated. As well as the family and houseful of electronics, he also had two trailers he rented out, and owned a house boat just like Crockett had on Miami Vice for a couple of summers. If a high school dropout managed that lifestyle, I could hardly wait to see what my state college degree would get me. Ha!