I’ve been wanting to write this for many, many years. What has stopped me is the idea that I don’t want to whine about my childhood or life- I don’t want to come across to you as a complainer who can’t move past the things in his past that shaped him for ill or good.
But with the years comes a modicum of wisdom, hopefully, and along with that comes the realisation that my stories are shared stories, shared worldwide by people who really should have had a better go at this thing we call life.
Isn’t that what we are trying to do with active politics? Aren’t we trying to make things better so that the pains of the past don’t get repeated? Perhaps some of the causes of those pains, they’ll even become extinct. One hopes.
So, why am I a liberal? Heck, I’ll go ahead and say it, a liberal democrat?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say selfishness meets empathy. I’ll try to explain that. It has always seemed logical to me that if we make it better for everyone, why, then it will be better for me as well!
One of my earliest memories is from about 1968- mom had spent the whole day telling us boys “Wait until your father gets home, I’m going to tell him how bad you’ve all been!”
I was never bad- I had a brother who suffered from extreme ADHD- before they knew what that was, so the “Trouble” always started there and it NEVER ended. Well, we were in bed when dad came home from work, it was dark, and I remember him telling us to line up before the couch as he stripped the belt from his grey work trousers after hearing mom’s litany of our misdeeds.
“Floyd, don’t you beat those boys!” I remember her saying that and then I remember him asking her if she wanted some too before we got ours- I remember seeing my MOM be put over his knee and beaten with a belt because she dared to get between us and him.
That was the last time she ever tried that. About a year later we moved from the country into the city and it became clear to me as the years went by that while not all kids at school lived the way we did, a lot of them did. None of them wanted to, though.
I found I did not enjoy ANYBODY being able to grab and beat me on a whim, and it happened daily- on a whim.
“This is for the trouble you get into today that I won’t ever find out about!” He’d say and then he’d beat us before we were sent to school.
I remember being asked by my fourth grade teacher why I rocked in my desk chair, back and forth, back and forth, non stop. “What do you mean, ma’am, I’m not rocking back and forth” I said. That resulted in a visit to the school psychologist and then a visit by my dad where it was made clear he would kill anyone who stuck their nose into his family’s business. I recall my father beating my younger brother with a belt in the driveway, a police unit, one cop, imagine that- stopped and got out, saying “Stop beating that boy!”
My father did, indeed, stop and told him “You have a pistol, if you want me to stop, stop me, otherwise this is MY boy and I’ll do what I need to do with him!” And he went back to beating my brother. The cop drove off, he found a pressing need to be elsewhere.
I don’t know if it was terror- the old man giving us all little tiny slivers of “Days Work” chewing tobacco and telling us to chew it up real good and swallow- then laughing until he had to sit down as we threw up all over the yard. Or the idea that we were allowed to smoke from, for me, the age of eight- because “You’re going to start anyway, might as well be now.”
So many things, so many- which is why I was thinking of a series.
Mother eventually divorced dad, he’d bought another weapon- she came to school and took us out of class. Once we were home I was told “Hurry up, if your father comes home and catches us leaving, he’ll kill us all with that damned gun!” Process that one when you’re seven years old.
That’s where my selfishness met my empathy. That cop left, as was made clear to me later, because my father had an inherent right to do anything he wanted, pretty much, to his family. All fathers did.
I remember being shocked when my mother had to go to her boss to get a signature so she could get a loan for a car to get to work with. As a divorcee, no bank would give her credit without a male, any male, signing that she was good for the money. This outraged me. This was not fair. Fair play became incredibly important to me. I wanted these things to STOP!
When you grow up as I grew up, surrounded by nothing but hate- sibling hate, paternal hate, maternal indifference or resignation, the community dislike because we were “Those boys from THAT family”- that idea of fair becomes one that you really latch onto, because none of that was fair. That was something I could get behind when I was old enough to vote! Lets make it a bit better, then a bit more!
It was the time of Steve Miller and the lyrics to his song “Fly like an eagle” TOUCHED me man.
Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh there's a solution
I believed that. I wanted that. For one thing, I was the kid who was forced to go to school with work boots on, sporting a crew cut. You know that old saying, children are cruel? Guess where it was coined. Teachers too, though.
We never had enough money and so, it was work boots and sneakers for gym class. We were always one step away from homeless because dad flat out would not work, and if he did work, temporary, he did not agree that his money needed to go to anybody but him.
As I said earlier, it became clear to me that not only was I not a singular victim of such things, there were people who had it a LOT worse. Please don’t get me wrong, I came away from all of that having gone from-
“Oh, Kelly, he’s the Sunday child, always smiling, always happy”
To
“Son, you can’t cry all the time, you need to toughen up!”
To
“Goddamn you ‘re a VIOLENT ASSHOLE WILL YOU GET YOURSELF UNDER CONTROL?!”
But that was my personal journey, it took a lot, gave me a lot and stole even more before I finally started exorcising some of those demons. I’m not done with that one yet, but it is getting a LOT better.
(My wife started healing me and she has never stopped, but she had no idea what she was getting for a husband- she’s my hero- she never, ever gave up on me.)
I cannot give all of the blame to my father or even my mother. I went to a school where, sometimes, I would be quite liberally paddled by the principal with a wooden paddle- it had holes drilled in it. Society found this more than okay, it was to be applied vigorously, that discipline.
Looking around the neighborhood, well, my mom wasn’t the only one with the occasional bruise, dad really avoided hitting her in the face, other neighborhood fathers weren’t so discriminating and it all seemed so tawdry and ill. Because NO one would stop it, heck, I was taught that if I did not beat my wife, I would be a failure as a man. That is garbage, but that was the lesson back in the day.
Let me say, here and now, that as violent as I have been in my past, that is one line I have never crossed.
Deep down, I really do not believe anyone has the right to go beating on anyone else. Not dad, not the Grandfather, not the cop, not the mother, the teacher. No one.
I can remember one hug from my mother. One. We were about to go somewhere and dad had just gotten us with the belt. It was never, really, just the one who was in trouble that got the belt. Oh no- if we forced him to beat one of us, he was going to beat all of us. I was very small and was crying. She knelt down to button up my coat and told me “Try not to cry, it’s cold outside and your tears will freeze to your face” And she hugged me. I cannot remember- wait, I think when I came home from the Army the first time, she gave me a hug. I think.
By the time I met my wife, I HAD no emotions. I was as close to an automaton as one could become, excepting rage. That one was always real close to the surface.
Do you see why I hesitate to write this down. Many years later, talking to the neighbor woman who was like a sister to me, Mary, I told her I didn’t remember much of all of that and she looked at me really weird.
“My god, Kell, the SCREAMS that used to come from your guy’s house, everyone knew. You're blocking what you don’t want to remember.” Strangely, after that conversation and more, a LOT of memories came back. I think that was necessary.
Everyone knew and there was no effort to help. Heck, there wasn’t even a mechanism to help.
“I’m sorry ma’am, but he’s your husband!” is just one of those things that I’m glad police officers no longer have to tell a woman.
That is one of the reasons why I am a liberal. That is one of the reasons why I am a democrat.
Because this needed solutions, and only the democrats have the will to create those.
I didn’t have JD Vance in mind when I sat down to write this, but I will say this to him and his idea that a woman should stay chained to a man that abuses and harms her- Politely- go fuck yourself.
I’ve been fighting that legacy, because it took her SO many years to leave him because it was not really POSSIBLE to leave him- for sixty years and it still affects me- I KNOW it affected her and my siblings.
And that is one of the myriad reasons…
I am a liberal and I vote democrat.
For the solutions.
Kell
