I am a Democrat, more than that, I am a liberal. So, when AlyoshaKaramazov issued a challenge:
I call on all Kossacks to submit at least one diary in the next few weeks, speaking about what the Democratic Party has meant, and means, to them. Speak of your very first introduction to progressive politics. Speak of a personal hero in the party. Speak about some family member, friend or coworker who has seen the light, and who no longer wishes to use government for the purposes of shredding our national fabric, but who wants to pitch in and sew it back together. ~AlyoshaKaramazov
I chose to accept.
Of course there is a back story, its not about what going on today. I am not a liberal because of today. None of us woke up one day and said, yeah that Democrat thing is form me. It was process, over time. Somewhere in our lives were lessons that led to a progressive (liberal) view point, a view that lead us to choose Democrat. So for the long dissertation follow below the wiggly wobbly thing.
I grew up in a small, rural, southern Utah town. I was born in 1971, and moved to what I consider my home town in 1978 to live with my grandparents. Both were children in the Great Depression, my grandfather served as a Marine infantryman in the South Pacific surviving both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. My grandfather was an elementary school teacher and my grandmother was the junior high and high school lunch lady. We weren’t rich but we were solidly middle class.
I don’t recall much about political parties, politics, or ideology being discussed as a kid. No one ever said to me, “we are Republican,” or “we are Democrat.” With the 20/20 hindsight of adult-hood I know now that we were Democrats, but I didn’t know that as a kid. The “values” lessons I was taught at home were about compassion, empathy, service to others.
We were active in the predominate religious tradition of the area (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). In fact I knew very few people who were not Mormon, and most of those non-Mormons were through my mother who lived in the Salt Lake area. I know as an adult that Mormon communities are very socially conservative. But the lessons I was getting as a kid at home and in church were liberal, about things like compassion, feeding the poor, helping those who are less fortunate, service to my fellow man, gratitude for the blessing I have been given, and having empathy. Maybe my grandparents were preparing me for the truth about my family that I couldn’t see as a young child.
In hind sight, those lessons were take-aways that it seems I was the only one getting. Most people I grew up with worship the Jesus of tax cuts, limited government, and repression of the Va-Jay-Jay. Even in my own family I have close relative who have crossed over to the philosophy of selfishness and greed.
When I was 13 I went to live with my father, because it’s what I wanted. The family didn’t really think it would be a good idea, but I wanted it and damn it I am stubborn. My mother and father divorced when I was six, I hadn’t seen my father much in the intervening years even though I had lived with his parents since I was 8. The arrangement lasted a year. It was probably the most important year in my life, the year that changed my entire world view.
Dad was an alcoholic, chronically under-employed, dysfunctional adult. My step mother a drug addict – though most in the family didn’t know that at the time. I had a step brother, a half-brother, a half-sister, and another half-brother on the way. My dad’s family survived, in the Regan 80s, on food-stamps, unemployment, welfare, WIC, etc. You get the picture, a Republicans dream talking point.
Until I lived with my dad, I had never gone to bed hungry, I didn’t have to do my own laundry, I had never had to get myself up, dressed, fed and off to school without some kind of supervision. In fact I had woken up to a full breakfast ready and walked to school every day from the third grade through the fifth grade with my grandfather because he taught at my school. In the 6th & 7th grades I went to school with my grandmother.
If dad wasn’t at work he was passed out drunk. Not the violent mean abusive drunk, just the neglectful self-medicated drunk. My stepmother wasn’t much better, provided a minimum of supervision. Basically she kept us kids from getting dangerously stupid. But neither provided much parenting or guidance. In this year I was exposed to tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, etc. The less that affluent neighborhood had me attending a junior high whose quality of education was… lacking. A junior high nothing like my home town school. This was a junior high were kids openly smoked and got drunk at school. Something unimaginable in my sheltered life in my home town. I mean the home town really was 1950’s Leave it to Beaver ideal.
I was oldest by 4 years with each of the kids coming in 3 year intervals after that, the youngest born about 3 months after I arrived. So I was really the only one who could really see what was going on. I was the only one who had ever lived in a stable nurturing house hold.
I had always blamed my mother for my dad’s leaving and the divorce. It was unfair to her but it was during this year at my dad’s that I came to understand I was wrong and what she had put up with for 7 years of marriage. I learned what living in poverty was like, I learned all about avoiding bill collectors, how to live on food stamps, having to stand in line for the free lunch at school, about struggling day to day just to make it through. I learned my presence in the house was paying the rent because my grandparents and my mother were paying child support. A lot of pressure on a 13 year old; leave and your siblings loose a place to live, stay and who knows what happens to you. It was a world apart from the one I had known until then.
Then, near the end of the school year came the news that brought my world crashing down. My grandfather died of a heart attack. I hadn’t realized just what a figure in my life he was until he was gone. Within weeks of this, my stepmother left my dad for good. What I was surprised by was the reaction of my dad. I thought he would slip further into the abyss, instead he cleaned up, somewhat. He became more of a presence. Still passed out drunk every night, but not at noon. Not until my siblings were in bed. He managed to get full time (low wage) employment with health insurance, with the state DOT. Things were actually looking up.
So, I being fairly miserable and firmly aware of the real dad situation was overjoyed when my Grandmother asked me to move back a the end of my 8th grade year, but it was a big worry too. Dad would be on his own to care for my siblings. I could see a future like my fathers if I stayed, or I could see a better future if I moved back home. In the end it was that one word, “home,” that was really the deciding factor for me. I had never felt I was home at my dad’s, I did at my grandparents. So I moved home.
My worry for the welfare of my siblings didn’t last that long, it was only 8 months later that my father became very ill. He had to be hospitalized, which left an aunt to care for my siblings. 10 days before the anniversary of my grandfather’s death and about a month after falling ill my father died. He never left the hospital. My siblings stayed with my aunt through the end of the school year and then they moved in with my grandmother, youngest aunt, and I.
Beyond that one year at my dad’s, the story of my growing up is fairly unremarkable. There is little league, band practice, school. But that year was huge in who I am. I think it explains very much why I didn’t grow up conservative clone. Why, unlike almost everyone I grew up with, I am a liberal. I got a taste, at a formative age, of what it’s like to be helpless in the face of your circumstance.
I learned most of the people on welfare are kids, most of the people fed by food stamps and free school lunches are kids, I learned that those kids are helpless in the face of their circumstance, they can’t earn a wage they can’t buy the food. That sometimes the people that are supposed to support you as a kid, to build your self-esteem and teach you how to succeed, are broken and there is nothing you can do as a kid to fix it. I learned, through my father’s death, what the difference between having and not having insurance means.
But I also learned that there is a better life out there, that it’s not all hopeless. I learned that this great country, the richest country on earth, had a standard below which we wouldn’t let the helpless fall. I learned to believe that we, collectively, could make a better world with very little sacrifice of our own just by caring, supporting, and by giving someone a hand.
I am a Democrat because I believe we are citizens of a great nation, and as the fortunate we should do the best we can to pay back the good luck that was the accident of our birth, because we are all interconnected and where we were born, or to whom, should not decide whether we suffer or prosper. We are the richest nation on earth, but we’ve become content to let our children and our elderly starve? We are content to let others suffer because we’re doing alright? I believe we are better than that, and I believe in a better world than that. I am a Democrat because I believe people really can raise themselves out of the depths of poverty and reach their full potential, if they have opportunity and the support.
I have been lucky, I won the lottery being born male, white, and to the predominate religious tradition in my community; my life is comfortable, I have what I need and more than a little of what I want. Why should I seek to horde what I have when others may benefit. Why should I fret that my marginal tax rate is 28% or 35% when others worry about the food they can’t afford and the children they must feed? I believe in compassion and empathy, a little help that comes with little sacrifice part can make the world better for us all? I’m in.
I am a Democrat because I believe in us. There are family member, teachers, scout masters, mentors, neighbors, and countless nameless others who made me who I am. I didn’t get here on my own. I know the difference responsible caring adults can make, and I know the damage that those who aren’t can do. I believe in US, the plural. I don’t believe in you or me. I believe it takes everyone, and I refuse to fall to the sway of the cult of me, and the cult of greed.
That’s why I am a Democrat.