Nor can they be....nor will they be. Having been born on the first day of 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin I have been around long enough to know that the American Republic President Obama would like to see is not the American Republic that I am familiar with nor one the majority of us want it to be 'transformed' into.
President Obama and I sort of have some childhood experiences in common mainly that we were not raised by our parents, that we are to some degree the product of mentors and for better or worse, that we are both self made.
I was born as the last child into a family of 7 children wherein the last three of us experienced drunken parents. The four older kids were pretty much out of the house before our family unit disintegrated, our parents got divorced and us three youngest were pretty much thrown to the wolves.
We were poor and often times did not have coal for the furnace, ice for the icebox and food for the table. What money that did come into the house managed to find it's way to the neighborhood beer depot, which in Milwaukee, also delivered just like the coal, ice, milk, and about everything else.
I wasn't very old, maybe 5 or 6 when my next oldest brother went to live in the Milwaukee County system, on a farm just outside of Milwaukee....foster home I guess. Then my next older sister was removed from the home also and went to a catholic girl's home. By the time I was 8 or 9, it was just my mom and I trying to live on those welfare cards given with different denominations on each side and local merchants would punch out the amount they required for whatever it was that was used by my mom and I. My mom could get one diner owner to punch out certain denominations and get cash from him which she could then use to buy beer and tobacco.
My mom and I lived in apartments first on Milwaukee's near south side, mostly populated by Mexicans and Peurto Ricans and then on the north side where I was, at one time, about the only little white face in the public grade school I attended. Those were happy times. My momma loved me and of this there was no doubt but she was weak.
About the time I was 8 or 9 years of age, my mom and I went to the County Courthouse and my mom went in to talk to the judge while I waited in the hallway. After a while, a woman came out and asked me if I was hungry and did I want to get something to eat. We went to eat and then the woman took me, not back to my momma, but rather to the Milwaukee County Children's Home (MCCH as I came to know it).
My mother would come and visit me on Saturday's when the paddy wagon hadn't picked her up the night before and my father visited me a few times over the next 4 or 5 years. At that point in my life until my 17th birthday, I stayed at the children's home through 8th grade, 4 different foster homes and lastly, a catholic boys home in Milwaukee. I ran away from those places...to where, I don't know and I always got caught.
The children's home was probably good for me, i.e., I got my meals, security and warmth in Wisconsin's cold winters. They took us to see Old Yeller in downtown Milwaukee, to ball games at County Stadium and even to Christmas parties at the Pfister Hotel where I got to see ball players from the old Milwaukee Braves, like Eddie Matthews, Joe Adcock, Warren Spahn and Del Crandall...maybe even Henry Aaron...I do not remember. Every trip was on the big old bus with MCCH on its sides....I could hardly look out the windows and look anyone in the eye....I suppose I was embarassed.
At 17, I quit high school, got Milwaukee County to sign for me and joined the U.S. Marine Corps where I spent the next 9 years of my life. None of us 7 kids graduated high school.
Those were my formative years and while I suppose they could have created in me a life long whiner, they didn't. I had no official mentors but I did have angels along the way, a catholic nun, Sister Consuelo at Pius XI High, chaperones at Milwaukee County Children's Home and a woman on a city bus who pulled me over to her as a shivering 6 year old and kept me warm.
Somehow, after those 9 years in the Marines, including two tours in Vietnam, or maybe because of those 9 years in the Marines, I grew up straight. I got my GED, I got a Business Management degree from Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Virginia and later got my BS degree from Indiana/Purdue University at Fort Wayne in a town I still reside in today. I used my GI bill to help defray college and living expenses because by now I was married with two adopted girls and I worked full time while going to classes full time (12-15 hours) every semester. In Virginia I graduated with high honors and at IPFW I graduated on the dean's list. Not bad for a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had every right to claim victimhood and become a lifelong whiner.
I know Barack Obama was not raised by his philandering dad, a communist from Kenya and not by his mom who was a life long progressive but by his maternal grandparents in Hawaii when his mother sent him there from Indonesia. His grandparents thought it advisable for the young Barack to have a black person as a mentor and chose a black, communist man with quite a FBI dossier.
Contrasting myself with Barack Obama, I know that we both had positive and negative influences in our life but I, fortunately, never had communists feeding me daily doses of Marxism, black liberation theology and Islam. I grew straight and strong....never became president of the United States and have no aspiration to any political office and Obama, well, he did not grow quite so straight and is now the president of the United States of America.
Today, President Obama thinks his father was the second coming of Jesus Christ and I of course know better. His father was a capital L loser who taught Barack all of his hatred for the America I grew up in an love....and Barack, weak in his own mind, stole the dreams of his anti-colonial father and made them his own. This is Barack's identity today....a hater of capitalism, a hater of individual freedom and accountability, a hater of real Christianity, a blamer of America for all the evil in the world today and President of our United States of America.
Today, I am semi-retired, drawing a small social security retirement amount along with some retirement pay from ITT for which I worked for 13 years. I used most of the 401K I had accumulated at ITT to pay for half of my two adopted daughters education at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and one at Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois. My IU graduate daughter is a CPA and does my taxes for me and whether she knows it or not, will do so until the day I die....my other daughter thinks I am a 'crazy old coot with a mythological Jesus'. Did I mention she went to college in Illinois?
My wife of 25 years, not the girl's mom, and I have a small ranch house with a declining mortgage and I do not suppose I can afford to retire any time soon completely as I do not wish to play the system even though Barack is making it increasingly difficult to live within our means. And I know the future is bleak.
So now you see two sides of a weird two headed coin....heads America wins, the other head, Baracks', and America loses.
Even though I see America slipping away through my fingers, worn and tired from a lot of hard years, I still believe I chose all the right paths and I will stand shoulder to shoulder with any of you people out there who will vote for conservatism, for God and for country. My question is....how many will stand with me?
It will probably come down to that place America, where all we have left is our dwindling fortunes, our lives and our sacred honor...I pledge mine to you and America. Can we agree that we cannot allow Barack Hussein Obama to realize the dreams from his father, the communist?
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