Mrrick's Blog

I was raised in the 60's and 70's in a quiet middle class neighborhood in the western suburbs of Chicago. I guess you could say it was your typical Ozzie and Harriet set-up as my dad worked at a corporate job and my mother was a homemaker. I have one brother and one sister. Each child was REQUIRED to take on household chores,lawn mowing,snow shoveling, laundry, dishes, etc. We received no allowance, except for special occasions. If there was something you wanted to buy on your own, say a model airplane or a new ball glove, we had to earn the money for those purchases. My brother and I each mowed lawns, and my sister did babysitting in her older years. All of us had paper routes at one time or another.

Once a year, we would go on a two week vacation to northern Wisconsin where my parents had a cabin on a small lake. Boy how we loved those trips. Everything was basically FREE! We would go fishing with our dad and he would pay for the Snickers bars and root beer. Mom would buy ice cream and pay for go-kart rides! All of this fun, and no work! No school grades to worry about. No papers to deliver. No grass to cut. We were having a blast! We didn't know or care where that money being spent came from.

My point of all this is that I see parallels to these scenarios in the political parties. Conservative Republicans can identify with our family's home life, while Liberal Democrats closely resemble our vacation times. This whole post came to me as I was falling asleep last night and I thought it might be a good comparison. I realize that there should always be a good balance between work and fun, but I also believe that the way our parents brought us up has a lot to do with our survival and comfort today.