Part 1 of a Series

Pass to Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion 1972

My polit­i­cal past sur­prises most peo­ple. I believe it is the extent of activ­ity pre-​1974 that con­tains the cul­tural hic­cup in most minds.

I grew up as the final child in a series of three. Birth order deter­mines per­cep­tion of the world. Don’t kid your­self, it truly does. My par­ents dif­fered greatly from my sister’s. Hers was a child­hood begun ten years before mine. Momma birthed this first baby girl in an Army hos­pi­tal staffed by physi­cians home from the front who needed some R&R from trauma surgery. Her days were filled with grand­par­ents and cousins whose lives cen­tered around a war to end all wars. I had post-​war 1954 baby boomer par­ents who were now in their 40s, estab­lished and set­tled, and who rev­eled in a new world filled with eco­nomic promise and optimism.

My par­ents orig­i­nated in Cincin­nati, Ohio, moved to Nor­folk, VA dur­ing WWII, and then Illi­nois for a decade after the war, end­ing up, even­tu­ally, in Fort Smith, Arkansas thanks to a head hunter in 1961. Both of my par­ents grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Cincin­nati in the 1930s. Momma started col­lege when she was 15 and grad­u­ated in 1937 with a degree in Engi­neer­ing. Daddy stud­ied busi­ness and received degree in same. He’d been offered a full schol­ar­ship to med­ical school at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity but due to the Great Depres­sion, his par­ents could not afford his liv­ing expenses so he, like my mother, attended a Street­car College.

In the post-​war Eisen­hower — Gold­wa­ter Repub­li­can Era, when some­one was said to be “an Ohio Repub­li­can”, the moniker car­ried a dis­tinct def­i­n­i­tion along with it. My father read Ayn Rand, William F. Buck­ley, John D. Mac­Don­ald, Ian Flem­ming, Amer­i­can Her­itage and National Geo­graphic — and more. His polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy could be con­sid­ered a clas­si­cal plu­ral­ist (I sup­pose) but more likely a con­ser­v­a­tive who reflected the mean­ing of the word dur­ing the post-​war era, cer­tainly not this one. He spent decades as a labor nego­tia­tor, an arbi­tra­tor who was well liked by both unions and management.

Daddy taught me to con­sider all sides of an issue.

*Par­ents take note: if there is one sin­gu­lar les­son to teach your chil­dren, it is to appre­ci­ate how every­one comes to the table wear­ing dif­fer­ent clothes and some peo­ple have no shoes.

The Polit­i­cal Essay con­tin­ues tomor­row. I’ve begun to con­sider the past and couch my per­cep­tion of it in a sort of echo or con­trast to today’s frag­mented polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies. From Nixon to Now.

I attended the 1972 Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in Miami. I was 17 years old. It is a “Born on the Fourth of July” remem­brance and it’ll take a few days to get it all straight.

*NOTE: Google Ads keep pop­ping in here with a “Sarah in 2012?” vile adver­tise­ment. Click it, make me some money. Go ahead. I can’t seem to get the damn adver­tise­ment fil­tered off my account so if it’s pro-​palin please know I think she is full of crap, an oppor­tunist, a media whore who sells out her own chil­dren even the devel­op­men­tally dis­abled baby for a buck, she is a loath­some plague upon the earth, a boil on the ass of com­mon sense, a ridicu­lous money-​grabbing back-​stabbing illit­er­ate freak who talks out of both sides of her mouth and her words are pure garbage. I, quite lit­er­ally, hope she eats shit and dies.

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