(50 Weeks)
Politics and religion were taboo subjects not to be covered at the dinner table and especially larger family gatherings. But those rules apparently applied to other families, not mine.
Religion was easy. We were Roman Catholic. We attended Sunday mass every week. I was educated in Catholic school. Our friends were Catholic and as such we were all destined for heaven. Nothing more to discuss. Politics were a little more complicated.
I grew up in a Republican family. At least my parents were Republicans. Members of their bigger Irish families were left questioning their sanity when, in 1960, they supported Nixon and not Kennedy. “What kind of an Irish-Catholic doesn’t vote for Kennedy?” my grandfather reportedly asked. Religion and politics may have been okay subjects to discuss, but to my parents they were also mutually exclusive.
Despite intense political discussions at family gatherings for decades, no one stopped coming or talking to anyone else and I learned that healthy debate of important issues was a good thing.
One of my earliest political memories was attending a Nixon rally at Fort Lee High School (NJ) in October 1968. I was three. I went on to at least shake hands with every Republican who served as president or was a candidate for president through 1996. I campaigned for candidates at every level of government alongside my parents, and eventually on my own as a precocious 12-year-old in 1977, the year of my dad’s successful bib for town council.
The first Tuesday after the first Monday in June was primary election day in New Jersey. Typically, with little party in-fighting locally, primaries were boring. Not in Franklin Lakes. After doing all the work to elect candidates they only marginally agreed with, my parents and some others broke away from the town’s Republican establishment and formed the Franklin Lakes Responsive Republican Organization – the FLRRO!
This made primary election night so exciting! Results were reported much slower than they are today. Although we used what technology was available to us at the time. As totals were read off the machines at each polling location, they were relayed back to us sitting in a van at headquarters (Mayor’s home) via CB radio. Breaker 1/9, this is RRO HQ. That’s a 10-4 on the D-2 totals. And we knew before everyone else inside the house that my dad had won.
We didn’t always win. I learned to accept defeat or be a gracious winner regardless. A childhood friend’s dad, beat my father’s candidate for mayor one year, and oddly, we’re still friends and connected on Facebook today.
I think the competition was good for the town. When faced with a choice, citizens are more likely to scrutinize how their tax dollars are spent. Residents showed up for council meetings. I miss those days regardless of who won. In retrospect, I also have a lot of admiration for the adults back then who could duke it out politically and then get along at church and other community functions. They set good examples for us kids. The one thing they were all in an agreement on however, was democracy.
Today, we have lost the ability for peaceful discord, or maybe most of those alive now spent too much of their childhood avoiding talk of politics and religion that they never learned appropriate skills for healthy debate. Or maybe the internet has created an environment where disseminating actual facts and conducting proper research of a topic has become a lost art. Or maybe too many have lost their love for democracy.
Did you really think this wasn’t going to include a fundraiser? It’s me. Of course it is! Over the course of these 60 weeks, I am hoping to raise $6000 for the children of Mercy Home for Boys & Girls (that’s just $100 a week!). To learn more about Mercy Home and my why, please visit my fundraising page. Thank you.
