This is my first #DiaryDays entry. www.dailykos.com/... Please join in!
Growing Up Republican
So, as you can imagine, this is not the easiest thing to admit to on a highly Democratic and Progressive-leaning site. It also delves quite a bit into my personal history, which is always a bit painful to talk about, let along write about and share with the internets.
My earliest memories of growing up are mostly of the various forms of Republican indoctrination that I experienced. It could be as simple as a sly comment made by my heavily Republican father to my high-religious mother who insisted she was an Independent. But my experience wasn’t just limited to them. My entire extended family and all of my friends growing up were diehard Republicans. It was a self-reinforcing bubble, but it had cracks. I will get into those a bit later.
I was born in 1979 and grew up during the Reagan years. It was a time of great Republican strength. To put some perspective on the matter, my parents grew up during the late 50s and early 60s. Their generation heard about how awesome America was, how they could be or do anything, and how their parents have saved the world from all these evil foreign entities and ensured they would live in the most prosperous nation on the planet.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Instead my Father ended up fighting in Korea, lost quite a few friends, and came home to what he viewed as an American public that hated him for serving his country. Meanwhile, my Mother was told about all the possibilities now open to women who had finally earned the right to vote and how it was her world for the taking. Ohh, but don’t forget to get married young and have kids right away, then you can start this exciting adventure that is your own life.
In their case, the exciting adventure involved getting multiple default notices on their mortgage while barely feeding me and my bother any meat they could using Food Stamps and my dad’s unemployment checks.
This worked out so well, that when I was somewhere around 9 or 10 years old, my parents convinced me to cash in all the bonds my grandparents gave me at birth for about $600 so that we could get our electric turned back on during a heat wave in the summer.
Regardless, I grew up hearing about the American Dream and how it was mine for the taking, but not really.
- The Gays were going to kill me with HIV/AIDS that was a punishment from God
- Affirmative Action meant that as a White Male, I was going to be at a disadvantage my entire life
- I was going to be paying taxes for my entire life just to pay for the greedy n-words and Welfare Queens that were leeches on society
- It takes a church not a village to raise a family
- Illegal Immigrants, specifically the dirty Mexicans, were destroying all the good jobs
- Gangs were taking over
- The military was to be respected at all costs
- DADT was going to destroy our military because all our soldiers would be too busy watching their backs instead of watching the enemy
- The Gulf War was great because we had to secure American’s future, but you can’t trust a DemocRAT to go to war. We shouldn’t be the world’s police.
- Clinton was going to issue a draft to fight his wars and kill a bunch of Republican kids in the process. Win-Win for him.
- Though we needed another war because that was how you got Church attendance up and reminded people of the importance of God.
There was a lot more than that, as you can imagine, everything you can imagine, but that was a great start. The irony is not lost on me now how many parents condemned the very social programs that saved their asses multiple times (and are now doing so in their retirement).
Now, this wasn’t helped by the sudden “Great White Flight” that happened in my neighborhood when I was around 7 or 8 years old. It took all of about 2 to 3 years for the town to turn from 95% white to 90% black. Within another 5 years, it was <1% white. This just made all my family and friends more paranoid.
Pile on some misogyny, good ol’ fashioned hate of the “cripples”, distrust of anyone deemed an “other” and you have the making of a well-raised Republican youth. Or so everyone thought.
Little did they know...
Progressives Already Won the War!
I am sure this statement makes no sense right now, but first you have to realize, Progressives, despite losing in 2 HUGE landslide elections in 1980 and 1984, had already started to change our society.
The first thing to note is that Republican parents are mostly paranoid about their kids ability to be successful in business when they get older. In the 80s and 90s, they saw the writing on the wall. Even as they taught us the ways of the racist, the bigot, and the religious fanatic; they couldn't have us express this in public.
That was the first crack in the wall. For Gen X, Y, and the Millennials, this crack was what started to open their minds.
You seeing, around the time I was about 8, as my neighborhood started to change, my parents noticed some things that scared them. They noticed that a lot of the neighborhood kids were, frankly, being racist jackasses to their new black classmates. While they were happy to be racists themselves, and to raise us racist, the last thing they wanted was for us behave that way in public. It could ruin our lives.
Here comes the funniest moment I remember from my upbringing. I have since learned this was actually a fairly broad thing that happened across most of the mid-west in Republican circles, but it is still equal parts amusing and shocking.
In an attempt to get their white kids to not act racist around blacks and other minorities, they started to convince us we were part minority. To be clear, this in and of itself is highly racist behavior, but, it oddly seemed to work. Unfortunately for them, but fortunate for me and my friends, it worked better than expected.
The game that was played by my parents was convincing me that I had some Native American blood in my history. Naturally it was only a couple perfect, but you could notice it in the freckles on your arms, or the slight angle on your nose, or how I could run faster than most of my white classmates, or how my brother was stronger. Now, this was just supposed to stay in the home, but what kid is going to stay quiet about their new found Native American super power bloodline! What started as a few us from parents who met at a PTA meeting and decided to try this thing they had heard about, quickly evolved into an entire school filled with kids with Native American blood from 4+ generations ago. After all, what kid wants to be left out? When they heard from their friends about how cool it was, they went home and asked their parents if they also had the super blood. I, I was an Apache!
This didn’t solve all problems, but did lead into one of my biggest and clearest memories as a child. My Father was watching some war movie on TV when someone used the n-word. Now, you have to understand, my parents had used the word in front of me (and usually rapidly apologized). Me and my friends had even used the word at school a few times, even in reference to a couple of the new black kids in school. But when me and a friend heard that in the movie that day, we started laughing in the room over about the word and repeating it multiple times. In no time flat, my dad entered the room and was screaming at the top of his lungs. We were NEVER to repeat that word every again. Not in the house, public, anywhere. If he ever caught us doing so or heard that we did, we would be lucky to live to see the next day.
This was the next crack in in the wall.
From there, the cracks started to cascade. Next it was the black co-worker my dad had that “wasn’t all that bad”. The birthday party where they explicitly invited all the black kids from my class to join and made sure one of them sat at every table. The gay friend my mom had (I later found out was a lie). All the while still scaring me with the same old Republican lies.
Behold the Internets
So, it was about this time, after hearing much fawning over Ross Perot for a few years, we needed the government to be run like a business after all, that I started to understand and sense the contradictions of my youth.
Yea, I was also your typical rebellious teenager asshole who thought he knew everything. On top of that, I had my own atypical problems which included being a high school drop out that had a 4.2GPA before leaving (story for another day), but I was now starting to think for myself. On the plus side, I was also 16 years old now and had an “awesome” job at a local Dairy Queen. I spent almost every penny I earned on $3/hour AOL and computer upgrades for gaming. This was when my world really started to open up.
While I was starting to question what I was being taught, I really didn’t have an opportunity to learn with the rather dense bubble that surrounded me. Note that I never met my dad’s black co-workers or my mom’s gay friend. Now, in online BBS’s and AOL Chat Rooms, I did. I also had some great conversations. I got laughed at a lot (most of the people online that I met were from California at the time (big surprise), and they were completely shocked by some of what I thought about the world.
But I kept learning, absorbing, and growing. The cracks had opened a big enough hole that I was now becoming someone new.
The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back
Despite even the internet, I didn’t really understand the world. I now was trusting my intuition a bit more, but I wasn’t “hands-on” per-say.
That all changed one day in early 2000 and later in 2003. Well, it took a while yet, I voted for Bush in 2000.
In early 2000, I was now a Firefighter (yea, heavy Republicans who also will fight for their union to the death). I was building up all my certifications in the state of Illinois and was also an EMT-B on my way to being a Paramedic. In addition, I had gotten my GED, started my own computer services company (mostly installing school systems and fixing fire/police department issues everywhere), and was lining myself up for a nice full-time job in the service. When, out of basically no where, Microsoft offered this drop-out, GED holder, with 0 college credits, a full time job and moved me to Seattle.
Overnight my world changed. I could now experience what I had started to believe was true. All the “others” I had been made to be afraid of, were just normal people like me.
Well, except woman. Yea, I was a geek, and a Republican indoctrinated geek at that. If you can ever time travel and want to see everything that could possibly be wrong with a white male who things he is being oppressed, but yet thinks he is superior to women, visit me when I was 21. I was the White Knight who tried to protect every woman I met, after all, that is what I was raised a guy was supposed to do and that women needed. I was naturally smarter than all women. Ohh and women was just these overly emotional beasts that just didn’t understand how nice of a guy I was (cough cough unintentional stalker cough cough).
After screwing up about 30 dates through Match.com, I gave up and just assumed that all the women out here were “bitches”. Then, I met my wife in 2003.
That was the final straw that broke the camels back.
She didn’t take my shit. I still remember her chewing me out once for jumping in front of her and basically pushing her out of the way to open a door. I played it off well and acted like “duh, of course you don’t do that”, hoping she wouldn’t notice how incompetent I was, but whether she noticed or not, she made me a lot stronger.
I also learned a lot of things about misogyny from her. You see, she is a female Developer in the software in that is well over 90%+ male dominated. I learned about (and felt repeatedly ashamed by) all the ways that men mistreat women. I also learned a lot about women’s rights from her. How they extend well behind just being able to vote. How all these dirty little aspects of a woman’s body I was raised that I should just ignore, were actually very important for me as a guy to also understand.
She helped me to understand how important politics were. She was the one who introduced me to DailyKos and Glenn Greenwald’s old blog. I started out as a Dean supporter, but eventually voted for Kerry in the general election. With her around, I finally started to realize it was ok to talk religion and politics with friends and family. I had always been told that you don’t discuss them in polite company. The reality was that Republicans didn’t want to discuss religion and politics for fear of having their views challenged. Now that had changed.
I learned that one of the guys I had been playing D&D with for a couple years was bi. Another friend was actually a pot dealer. Yet another was an Atheist. I wasn’t scared of any of them anymore, for the first time in my life.
Recovering Republiholic
Yea, so ohh so happy redemption story. Its almost like Disney wrote it!
Except its not. The hard truth about being indoctrinated as a Republican for half my life is that I am still a Republican in many ways, no matter how hard I fight it.
When I get into elevators and see a black man, I get nervous and probably also make him uncomfortable.
I am occasionally too quick to defend authority figures, well except for police, I saw some fucked up shit when I was a firefighter (shudders).
But, I am a recovering Republiholic and one that would be happy to answer any of your questions.
Thanks for reading!