mom made me a liberal

Instead of my usual rant about how conservatives are ruining the world I thought I would write about why I feel that way.

I am just one generation out of the farm fields of north Alabama. My parents were raised up dirt poor in the segregated south. My mother was delivered by a black mid-wife because my grandparents were too poor to afford the white one. Her father skipped out soon after.

She worked almost almost from birth in the cotton fields of Alabama. She worked alongside her mother and grandmother picking and chopping cotton to earn money and tending the garden for food. They were also working every day with black people who were also dirt poor. She heard many first-hand accounts of racist cruelty against her fellow co-workers and grew to hate segregation. Also she was acutely aware of the hateful way they were treated by the people in town. They were white-trash, the dresses made from flour sacks were a dead giveaway.

She passed her values on to me. Her respect for all races. Her passionate concern for the poor. Her mistrust for authority. Her skepticism of the government. She became a nurse so don't even get me started on health care.

Whenever I think about conservatives I think about my mom 10 years-old working in those red clay fields. I picture her in a filthy flour sack dress listening to stories about lynchings and beatings while the landlord sat in town in his nice house looking down on all of them in contempt planing to raise the rent on them while his wife irons his klan robes.

My life growing up was no picnic. We were also poor. We moved all over the south trying to find a better life. We never starved but we never prospered either.

My mother will retire in June after 44 years as a nurse. she has worked every day of her entire life. Thank-you mom for giving me the drive to work hard and be beholding to no man. Thank-you for the compassion to see every person as a person worthy of help especially when they are being beaten down. Thank-you for making me see the rich man from town for what he is.

and thanks to her for raising a wonderful child!

My brother moved to texas and became a conservative asshole. We don't talk much. He married a woman from a upper middle class family and reinvented himself as Rush Limbaugh jr.

He's gotten a lot more quiet about Bush lately, though....

Thank you and I admire your mother from afar.

Recommended.

is a lack of empathy, which is usually born of living in an insulated bubble, formed either by wealth or by social group.

Thanks for an inspiring story.