Why I am a Democrat

               I began working with my grandfather, Yanno, a Slovakian ‘breaker boy’ from the coal fields of northeastern PA, before I was ten. I didn't work with him every day but whenever you worked with Yanno, you worked hard. He knew the meaning of the word ‘work’ and, by the end of the day, you did too. At the age of 14 I worked as a roofer’s assistant which is not easily distinquished from the chores that a mule does: carrying heavy things, like stacks of shingles, up to high places. I worked throughout my high school years as a paperboy for the early edition of the Morning Call. I also worked on a milk truck for a year, back in the day when people still had milk delivered to their front porch.

               I didn’t really need the money but I soon found a place to spend it in the gambling rooms of a small town in rural Pennsylvania. I didn’t know it at the time but I had a gambling problem which I was able to quit as soon as I got arrested in my living room after robbing a small general store when I was 16 years old. My father wasn’t around much while I was growing up because he was in the U.S. Army fighting the Vietnam War and working in New York City when he retired. That day he came into my life roaring like a lion as I was remanded to the custody of my parents.

               He beat me every day for two months, once in the morning and once at night. He even took off work for a month just to beat me. My gambling problem was cured. If you don’t know what fathers are for, now you do: they are here to keep teenage boys from going to jail.

               That’s life in Appalachia, that boom/bust area of the Appalachian Mountains where America grew up before it went off to fight World War II.

               After high school I worked in the service industry, working for tips, waiting tables and other jobs at resort hotels in the Poconos. It was not a good living but it was still a living.

               In my early twenties I lived in the town of White Haven, PA, and almost everyone I knew worked at one of the many resorts in the area. There weren’t a lot of single moms back then but I knew a few and they were able to provide for their children in spite of a dead-beat father who had skipped out on his kids.

               Sometimes the women had fled their husbands and were living in hiding out of fear of being found…and for good reason. Women had fewer rights back then and a husband who beat his wife was not the pariah he is now.

                The Poconos, short for Pocono Mountains, which in fact are part of a big plateau, was a great place in the late seventies and early eighties for all sorts of people to hide out, not just single moms from Philadelphia and New York City. The CIA had a safe house just outside of White Haven where it kept high-level defectors from the U.S.S.R. The ‘good felllas’ from the Mafia owned many homes in the woods where they would ‘hole up’ until things quieted down back in the city.

               Then came Ronald Reagan. I hear he has a reputation as a tax cutter but that is not how he affected my life. I had my first kid in 1989 and was working in the mountains of western North Carolina waiting tables at three different restaurants. It was no longer possible to make a living, even a bad one, working as a waiter or waitress. Each of the places I worked took out 20% of my tips to pay for taxes. Legally they only had to declare 8% but I’m 99.999% certain that money never made its way to the IRS but I had to pay it nonetheless.

               My wife was going to school at Appalachian University at the time and I was supporting her. After three months working in the South we had to go on welfare just to make ends meet. After a year we had to go back to PA and moved in with my parents because we had another child on the way. I found work in New York City, thanks to my cousin, pulling long cables of telephone wires from one floor to the next inside the giant high-rise buildings of The Big Apple.

               George H.W. Bush was president at the time and Wall Street was busy fleecing American corporations through down-sizing and out-sourcing. During this time I saw CEO wages grow sinfully large while the working man’s pay shrank. It seemed to me that the more money a company saved the more it paid its executives in bonuses. Everywhere I looked people were being laid off unless their workplace was unionized. The unions kept an eye on executive pay and fought tooth and nail against layoffs.

               Until the tech boom hit, it seemed the only jobs, the only good jobs, left in America were union jobs. The Republicans roared into Congress in 1992 and with their ascension they set about empowering America.

               When they cut welfare, strip clubs proliferated. When I saw a young man wearing a t-shirt that read, “I Support Single Moms” above the silhouette of a woman’s figure swinging around a pole, I realized that Reagan’s America was now my reality.

               I was surprised that the Republicans allowed this to happen because they were always professing their faith and morality. They constantly extolled their faith and aversion to promiscuity while they cut taxes and shrank government.

               I didn’t realize how dangerous that was until George W. Bush took us to war and cut taxes at the same time. Then I knew there was no fiscal responsibility behind the Republican mantras because they had no problem increasing spending while decreasing revenue, like paying bills with credit cards. This should have been anathema to the party reps who were so vocal at the time. Most of the people I heard speaking this week at the Republican Convention in Tampa, like Paul Ryan, who hopes to be vice president, supported these actions 100%.

               Until then, I had been on the verge of becoming a Republican. After the Republicans cut taxes in the face of two on-going wars, I realized we were going to be in for a rude awakening. I tried to navigate the financial waters on my own but got wiped out in the stock market along with the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

               With two kids in college, now divorced, I put my home up for rent when I, too, finally got laid off and had to travel to find work. I was a hair’s breadth from going to Afghanistan to work in telecom when I finally got a temporary position in San Antonio, Texas. After that I found another gig in New Mexico which is where I am now.

               I understand why people become Republicans. I don’t mean rich people, it is obvious why rich people become Republicans. I mean people like me, working class people. They see the bad effects of welfare: fat, poor people addicted to government handouts, feeding off the federal tit like a fat baby. But not all welfare recipients are like that. Most are like me, someone who needed it as life changed and had to learn how to change with it, then weaned himself from it.

               I see the appeal the Republican message has to the common man but I’ve also witnessed the effects of their policies in the real world: women turning to prostitution as a way to provide for their child in the absence of a father; corporations being robbed by their management teams, banks and other financial institutions, like Bain Capital, to the point where there is nothing left but foreclosure papers; a government that has been stripped bare of its abilities to protect its own citizens from Mother Nature and to incubate innovation like the Internet or to attempt grand challenges like Space Travel.

               For the last twenty years I have heard the Republicans whine about the pain of taxes and how many jobs they would create if only they could pay less. They’ve been getting tax breaks for the last twenty years and I’ve only seen jobs disappear during that time. Since Reagan, I’ve only seen my taxes go up. George W. Bush sent me a couple of checks for $300.00 in 2002 and 2003 but he cut funding to the states which got passed down to the counties who raised my property taxes by…..$300.00 per year…every year! Thanks a lot!

               And guess how we paid for those $300 giveaways? Thanks, China! Yes, we’ll pay you back…with interest, too, because our leaders are idiots.

               As much as the Republicans profess to be for small businesses, I can only see how they stifle those fledgling companies with their objections to a national healthcare plan.

               I’m sick and tired of hearing about how they’re against abortion when they controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Presidency and did nothing about it.

               The same goes for smaller government. In Reagan’s America jails are everywhere. If you’re not in jail then you’re probably working at one, either way you’re working for the government. And George W. Bush created a whole other branch of government while he was in office: the Bureau of Homeland Security. Amazing!

               Mitt Romney has already told us how he intends to bring America back: by declaring war on the Soviet Union. He doesn’t even care that it’s no longer called that anymore. In Romney’s America, women will be thrown in jail in large numbers for prostitution because he’s going to remove the safety net. He’s going to build a lot more jails, too, it’s what Republicans do best.

               I can remember sitting in church one January sunday, in 2003, listening to the priest raising a call to arms for the annual bus trip to Washington, D.C., to protest in front of the White House for the end of abortion. Then I recalled hearing Rush Limbaugh a few years back, asking his listeners to imagine a time when Republicans controlled all three branches of government: executive, judicial and legislative, and how they’d overturn Roe v. Wade. I realized that now we were there and nothing had changed. It was bizarre. I felt like the little boy who could see the king had no clothes and couldn’t understand why everyone was pretending he wasn’t naked.

               At 52 I see things differently. To me, ‘trickle-down economics’ now joins the list of great lies along with ‘the check is in the mail’ and ‘I love you’. I believe that if you truly believed in less government and more individual freedom then you shouldn’t bother voting: that’s the least amount of government possible. By participating in the process, you become part of the problem you believe exists. If you think abortion is wrong, don’t get one and do everything you can to help people realize that bringing a baby into the world is the right thing to do.

               I am a Democrat because I believe Jesus was one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived. When he said we should render up to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God, that which is God’s, I found that inspiring. To me that statement says, how we deal with the government and how we relate to God, are two separate things. It says we should try and create the best government possible but that government is not the rule by which we measure our lives. From what I’ve learned in my lifetime, it is the ideas of the Democrats that sound like the best solution for today’s problems that give me all the leeway I need to concentrate on my relationship with God.

             Amen.

                (For a more in-depth looking into the mind of the Kayak Hombre and his thoughts on tango, buy his book: River Tango, now available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527 )