I turned 62 this year, this month. Not really celebrating so no well wishes. I will wait until I am 65 and eligible for Medicare before I celebrate (healthcare premiums are a b*tch when you retire from teaching but I am sure much worse for many of you).
Upon reflection, I wonder why I am not more to the right, more of a fascist, more rigid. I wonder why the older I get, the more liberal I have become.
Are there others like me?
More history of why I am questioning so much now to follow.
I was a child of the fifties. And I have, thank goodness (that I can remember things), mostly happy, albeit intense, memories of a childhood beset with confusing and conflicting messages. While I was growing up, I do not remember either of my parents talking politics. My father was a policeman (something that made me quite proud), and my mother worked in a factory. I was a latchkey kid long before I ever heard the term. I learned later that they were registered republicans (odd for my steel town) but mostly because if you worked for government in Montgomery County, PA, you were "supposed to register" republican (that in and of itself deserves a diary).
I went to catholic schools, thus was brainwashed for many years by nuns and priests, and feared hell at every turn. I went to the movies every single Saturday afternoon and watched serial movies that highlighted the "good vs evil" mentality. This was followed by stopping at church for confession. The fact that at nine years old I was being asked to "confess" to be saved is in and of itself a strange form of cruelty.
I feared aliens and commies as much as I feared hell. Aliens were often used in the 1950s scifi genre as metaphors for the "evil empire" wanting to take away every thing that was good and American. Commies were going to force me to give up my religion. I remember one nun asking us in fifth grade what we would do if a commie held a knife to our necks and gave a choice: deny "Jesus" or he would kill our families. I was stunned and scared. I knew I didn't want to deny Jesus, but I wasn't sure I had what it took to stay strong while they killed my parents. I used have nightmares about that. Then I prayed, and decided I would become a nun, go to Russia and with good works and lots of love convert them all to Christianity. Problem solved. Seriously that is how I thought.
I used to sometimes be so afraid at night, after practicing "duck and cover" in case of an atom bomb hitting that I used to imagine the government building this giant glass dome over America so we could all be safe. I played war with with neighborhood friends where we calmly shot and killed Japs and Geris. (I honestly did not know who Japs and Geris were. They were just the bad guys who came after Americans. It would be years before I understood world war, politics, and the stereotypes used to promote war on all sides).
The 1950s were a decade of paranoia. I remember my friends and I being told that the librarian at the "Friends (Quaker) Library" near our house was a....gulp...."communist". And we all wanted to go and see the Commie. I remember grown-ups talking about McCarthy, and arguing. But I did not understand any of it.
I lived in an area where segregated neighborhoods were not about race as much as by ethnic group. I lived in a mostly Italian neighborhood. When I got to high school, my two best friends were from the Irish neighborhood. Years later one told me her very Irish Catholic parents told her they could hang around with me (because I was female and just a friend but it was a good thing I didn't have a brother because dating Italian boys was forbidden). Our third friend was sort of an outcast in their church cause her mother married a non-catholic. Our neighborhoods were built around the churches. Later on that friend married a Jewish man. Talk about shock.
So why am I not a fascist, right wing, very catholic? Why and how did I become a liberal agnostic? I read once that most people become more conservative as they age. I wonder.
I ask my fellow Kossacks, particularly those who are my peers in age, what are your observations? Are most of your friends and family more or less conservative than in their youth? Are you more or less liberal or conservative now than when you were younger?
I wonder. When and how did the change start? My mother died in 1971 so I never really got to know her deep sentiments politically. My father seemed to remain apolitical until Reagan. Then he seemed to (suddenly to me) become more conservative. And he found religion after my mother died. My sister was the same. I, the little wannabbee nun, who feared my father was going to hell because he rarely went to mass and never took communion, was turning away from the church and the two people (Dad and sister) who seemed indifferent to church were going the other way.
What turned me? I remember starting to read MAD Magazine as a 13 year old. It really grabbed me and I always loved the Spy vs Spy. Maybe it was a relief to see something mocking things that so frigtened me as a kid?
And then there was The Twilight Zone. After all those Saturday Matinees where the scifi genre scared me, here was scifi that made me think. I was so hooked on that show. To this day, I can recall some of the episodes and how they startled my thinking process and yet did not scare me.
Then came the music. I can remember as a kid hearing these lyrics from The Merry Minuet:
They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch. And I don't like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud, for man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day, someone will set the spark off... and we will all be blown away.
They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran. What nature doesn't do to us... will be done by our fellow man.
These things (music, movies, education) were the start of me looking back and questioning things; seeing how absolutely silly it was to have kids hide under a desk as a protection from an atomic explosion. Recently, I explained to my niece, my conservative sister's child, that the government knew all along how ridiculous it was. She disagrees, and is stunned that I think the government would purposely lie about something so lethal. The sixites came and I remember living in two worlds. At college in central PA, where most people were oblivious politically and then on weekends coming home and hanging out with some liberal cousins who were questioning everybody and everything.
And then came the 60s and the 70s/
I saw and listened to HAIR and JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR and was affected. I watched Dr. Strangelove. I read Stranger in a Strange Land, The Dispossessed, DUNE, and Siddhartha
. But few of my friends did. I was not really a hippie in the romantic sense of wanting to go live on a commune or be free of everything. Coming from immigrant parents who worked hard, and in my mother's case died young, I felt a sense of duty to honor their sacrifices (after all two people with no more than an elementary education put two children through college). And to be honest, I liked teaching and I felt good about being able to take care of myself. I never really got into the drug (or drinking culture) other than a bit a smoking weed occasionally.
By the 80s I was becoming more and more frustrated with the status quo. My best friend (new to my life since 1976 and a true soulmate in reading and thinking) and I talked politics and religion and society all the time. She was a New Yorker raised in a liberal Jewish home (and her sister was a publisher (DelRay) of science fiction, and I was raised in a catholic Italian apolitical home. And yet we had more in common than many of my high school and college friends. We both hate the Reagan years and despised the phony "patriotism" he pushed. I became active in the Peace and Justic group here while she became engaged. But together we still could discuss these things all the time (fortunately her husband was much more liberal than most of my other friends husband's at the time). As a single female, I was often unappreciated (by some friends' spouses) for being so outspoken. The often referred to me as "Jane" thinking that calling me Jane Fonda was a way to insult me.
Outspoken liberal women of my generation did not do well in relationships, unless we learned to shut our mouths. I didn't. To this day, with some it remains a problem. Since I am reflecting, I may was well reflect the negative too.
So there it is. My reflecting shared. Probably boring. And I am not sure why. I just felt it needed to be done.
I would appreciate any sharing reciprocated.