That 47% of people “who believe that they are victims, who
believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that
they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it” would
have to include my mother, include all working mothers who vote Democrat hell
or high water.
My mother was always a Democrat. Maybe that was because she
lived during the Depression and World War II and loved Franklin D. Roosevelt
because she believed he saved the country and most of all care about ordinary
people.
Well of course the one big exception
would be Dwight Eisenhower. I'm sure she voted for the great man who
helped to save America and the world from the tyranny of the Nazis. He was
larger than either political party. As a president he was less perfect than he
was as a general. To his credit he warned America about the tyranny of the
military-industrial complex, though no president contributed more to its
growth, most unfortunately to development and multiplication of nuclear
weapons. He also warned about getting bog down in land wars in Asia. He was and
continues to be ignored by militarists, which do not believe Ike was. So Ike
was not a great president but was a great man before he became president. And compared
to him, all presidents since have been Lilliputian.
My mother was brought up dirt poor on a Texas farm. Her
father was a tenant farmer. It was a time before irrigation when scary dust
storms swept across the land like tsunamis. It was like drowning in dust. There
were a lot of kids to feed and not a lot of money. Her mother died when she was
just a young teenager. At the age of 17 she went off to work in New Mexico.
Eventually she ended up working in California as a welder in a factory that
made airplanes for the war. Then she started working as a waitress, helping to
put her ex-sailor husband through college. She would work in restaurants the
rest of her life.
The husband she helped through college abandoned her to raise her children alone. He never paid child support or alimony. She worked double
shifts, and when she could she paid for babysitters to take care of her children. The boys
would usually get into trouble if left alone, like setting off fireworks inside
the house.
Eventually she bought a small house and remarried. Her new husband drank too much. During that time she took care of three of her brothers who were alcoholics. Two had fought in the war. One had spent the war in a Japanese prison camp. Those two eventually committed suicide. She and her husband divorced and she moved back to Texas.
Eventually she bought a small house and remarried. Her new husband drank too much. During that time she took care of three of her brothers who were alcoholics. Two had fought in the war. One had spent the war in a Japanese prison camp. Those two eventually committed suicide. She and her husband divorced and she moved back to Texas.
There, she once again worked as a waitress, then managed the
restaurant. She bought two little cheap houses (both for about $20,000), lived
in one and rented the other. In West Texas they use the N word a lot. My mother
never did. In fact she upset some of the townsfolk by hiring black girls to work
in the kitchen. When she started them waiting tables some of the men told her
that if she didn’t get rid of the black girls they wouldn’t come back. She
didn’t get rid of the black girls and the men came back.
My mother worked until she got too old to work. She hated
not being able to work. Retirement never suited her. She retired on less than
$1000 a month from Social Security (another socialist entitlement program). Those
were my mother’s first government checks. Until then she never received any
form of assistance from the government, well except that she did send her children
to public (socialist) schools. I’m sure Romney would prefer citizens to send
their children to private schools like Cranbrook where he and his wife went to
school. And, his running mate, Paul Ryan, would prefer either home schooling or
Catholic schools to protect children from godless humanism.
I guess when my mother started collecting those Social
Security checks is when she started thinking that she was a victim, that the
government owed her a living, and that the government had the responsibility
for caring for her. I had always thought that she had earned those checks.
Of course she should have had an additional retirement plan
like a 401(k). But when she worked in California, I know she had two jobs, one
at a restaurant and one at a cocktail lounge. I assume that was because like
today the food industry prefers part-time employees in order to avoid paying
for benefits such as health coverage—certainly that’s an employer’s god-given
right, though Jesus was all about healing others.
As a waitress my mother’s main income was her tips, not her
hourly income, which most likely was minimum wage (another socialist
entitlement program). Like many Democrat working single mothers or even Democrat
working married mothers, there was no extra money left over for investments,
blind trusts, or offshore accounts. She didn’t have fancy accountants and
lawyers to offer sophisticated tax planning techniques that would enable to
avoid paying taxes. Fancy lawyers and accountants, like the people at Bain
Capital, would not have been interested in her.
My mother’s life consisted of hard labor at low wages (yes
being a waitress is hard labor, especially given waitresses have to put up with
obnoxious male customers), raising her children, and paying taxes. Even when
she managed a restaurant, which meant she did the accounting, the buying, the
hiring and firing, and was the chef, she made no more than $25,000 a year. She
never bought a new car except for a VW van she bought my brother when he came
back from the Vietnam War.
I suppose Romney would think that after fifty years plus of
hard work my mother had finally become a welfare mother. I say fifty years plus
because growing up the child of a poor famer she didn’t have much of a
childhood. She loved school because that’s were she could be with other
children. Her family went to town once a week. Farm life then was a life of
chores.
My mother liked Bill Clinton (I stopped liking the man after
the M.L. affair) because she believed that he cared about regular people. I believe
he did, though now that he’s royalty he seems to care most about fame and fortune.
He’s no Jimmy Carter that's for sure (whom my mother also liked, and Carter never dirtied himself). My mother liked Clinton because he was a
regular guy who had to work hard to make his way in life. She would have
thought that Mitt Romney, born into a wealthy family, could never understand
what it was like to be dirt poor and to struggle all of one’s life.
My mother had no chance to go to college. She was lucky to
finish high school. My stepfather, who served ten years in the navy, including
the World War II, didn’t graduate from high school. His parents had died and he
was raised by his brother. After the war he became a bartender and died on the
job in his fifties. He didn’t live long enough to benefit from government
welfare. Romney has never had to experience that kind of hardship. He spent
thirty months in France as a Mormon missionary. Come on, that not being a
missionary but a tourist! Albert
Schweitzer was a missionary.
And like George Bush junior, Romney loves saber rattling (actually
Obama does too). But he never served in the military, nor has his sons (nor did
the Bushian neocon Paul Ryan). During the Vietnam War, Romney received
five-and-a-half years of draft deferments, as a “minister of religion” and as a
student. My biological father was an orphan who was raised by aunt. He served
in the military. His ship was sunk somewhere in the pacific. He survived. My
mother never cared much for saber rattling. Maybe that was because she knew
what war did to men and the women who loved them.
When my mother became very sick, my brother brought her into
his house. She didn’t like feeling dependent. So my brother and I found her an
apartment in a HUD facility, for which she had to wait a year. She loved being
independent again. But now she really was a welfare mother, HUD being a federal
entitlement program. She died there.
My mother would have voted for Obama, perhaps because he is
black but mostly because he cares about regular people, even welfare mothers
like mine.
