On Being Republican -- 2

This post is a continuation of my original/first post entitled "Blog Name" and my post of September 19 entitled "On Being Republican."

Why am I a Republican?  I am the youngest of the eight children in my family.  My brother, the oldest of the eight, lived and died as a "yellow dog Democrat."  (For those of you who don't know, a "yellow dog Democrat" is a person who "will vote for the Democrat even if he is a yellow dog."  I have recently heard of "blue dog Democrats," but "yellow dog Democrats" aren't mentioned much these days.)  My brother and I had different life experiences.  Shortly before our father died, he took the lone $20 bill that our father gave him and left for college.  Shortly after I was born, our father died, and the family descended even deeper into the poverty that was first occasioned by the Great Depression.  He, my brother, knew the Depression of the 1930's.  I knew the welfare system of the 1940's and 50's.

My oldest brother and oldest sister left before our father died.
The second sister married soon thereafter.
The third sister stayed to finish high school and enter the military.
The fourth sister stayed a while and then married.
That left me and the fifth sister and the second brother with our mother.

We had left the little rented farm in the country and moved into town.  My mother had managed--she was good at managing to get things done--to buy a house and get it paid off.  After she did, she would never mortgage or impair the title in any way.  Several times, I heard her say, "If we have a place to stay, I'll get us something to eat one way or another."  She did.  She worked, dispite welfare rules, at a corner grocery store and took her wages in groceries.  She started at 10 cents an hour but eventually earned 25 cents an hour.  That meant $2.50 per 10-hour day.

We drew welfare--got an "Aid to Dependent Children" check.  That check started at, in my memory, $80 per month but eventually went to $130 per month.  That was for my mother and three kids.  The purpose was to allow single mothers to stay home and take care of their children.  If anyone in the family worked, and the welfare caseworkers found out, the check was reduced by the amount they earned.  If the welfare caseworkers knew that my mother worked at the store, they didn't say anything.

My mother had had a friend when she was in her early teens.  He was a Creek Indian boy.  She married my father when she was 15 years of age.  The Creek boy married.  Many years later, after my father died and the Creek divorced, and while we were living on that welfare check, he started visiting.  He lived in an old hotel downtown.  He would get a cab/taxi to our house many evenings.  Usually it was 7 o'clock when he arrived.  At about 9 o'clock he would call the cab and go back to the hotel.  He just visited.  He never spent a night at our house.  We kids were always there.

One month, the welfare check did not come.  Seems a neighbor--we often speculated about which neighbor it was--had called the welfare people and told them that my mother had an Indian man living with her.  Without any investigation of the facts, and without any warning to my mother, they stopped the check--and it stayed stopped for three months.

I've wondered if my mother's friend being Indian had something to do with what happened.

My sister, number five, happened to have had a job: school was out, and a family had hired her to look after their kids for the summer.  She made $15 a week, and if the welfare caseworkers had known, our check would have been reduced by that amount--if the check had been being sent.  They didn't know.  (Neither did they know about the few dollars I made selling scrap metals or raising rabbits.  I guess that you could have said that we were welfare cheats.)  Without my sister's $15 dollars a week, we would have been very short on rations.

Living on welfare is much easier now than it was then,

Welfare fosters dependency.  (So does incarceration, but that's another subject.)  One reason that I am not a Democrat is that the "voting base" of the Democrat Party is, in my view, largely dependent people--people dependent on the government.  And, in my view, the Democrat Party, in order to strengthen their "voting base," fosters dependency: they seem to want people dependent on the government.

If a person is dependent on the government, the person is at the mercy of bureaucrats--caseworkers and....

A day or three ago, I saw a tape of Obama on TV.  The showing was part of a news presentation on something or the other.  On the clip, Obama said, that the Republican Party "want[ed] to leave the middle class to fend for itself."  The middle class can, and almost always does, fend for itself.  That is why they are the middle class and not the poor.  If they stop fending for themselves, they will descend to an equal level of poverty with the poor.

The middle class tends to vote Republican more often than not.

On Being Republican -- 1

In my post of August 20 entitled "Blog Name," I suggested that I was a Republican, and not a Democrat, because my mother was a Republican.  There are other reasons.

In 1951, Dwight Eisenhower, the WWII general of note, ran for president.  And my grandfather was subsisting in Oklahoma on an "Old Age Pension."  At a time when many older people, like  Grandpa, had been forced off the farm, and out of other pursuits, by old age and declining health, Oklahoma undertook to provide such persons an "Old Age Pension."  Most of them did not have Social Security benefits.  This "Old Age Pension" was funded with a 1 cent (one percent of a purchase) sales tax.  In grandpa's case, his monthly check was c. $100.

The county in which we, and grandpa, lived was heavily Democrat.  The Democrat primaries determined who would hold the county offices.  Even if people were Republicans, they often registered Democrat so that they could vote in that party's determinative primary.  And I know that it was the case that the holders of some of the county offices had ran and been elected as Democrats but were secretly Republicans.

A point of anger that arose in that 1951 election, and remains with me unto this day, is that the local Democrats convinced my aged grandpa that, if Eisenhower were elected, his "Old Age Pension" would stop on the day of the vote.  When the old man heard that Eisenhower had been elected, he went as white as a sheet of copy paper: he almost died of fright.  This scare-the-old folks-to-get-elected tactic continues unto this day, and it still alienates me from the Democrat party.

BTW, that 1 cent regressive sales tax that was only opposed by a minority, and that few begrudged the elderly the proceeds of, grew to 2 cents and them became a monster tax in Oklahoma.  Sales taxes now fund an array of things other than benefits to the elderly.  In many jurisdictions, they push up toward a dime on every dollar.  If you give politicians an inch on taxes, they'll take a mile.