was programmed at birth to be a Democrat, a big city liberal. My parents were and Catholic. Pardon any redundancy. In my slice of the East Bronx, you went to high school, you did a few years
Beautiful swingers looking casual encounter free online dating in the military, and then you came home to look for a job with Con Ed or the city. Two of my uncles were on the job, NY City cops. The guy across the street was a fireman. The neighborhood was mainly blue collar, Italian, Jewish, and just a Puerto Rican. The local political machine was run out of the Nest Society, a store front political club; or run out of the Step Inn, a bar on White Plains Road next to the fire station. The Step Inn was a microcosm of the neighborhood; the guy who owned building was Jewish, the guy who ran the saloon was, and the who made the pizza in the back was Italian. If you wanted a job with the borough or the city, or you needed something fixed on your street, you had to someone at the Nest clubhouse or at the Step Inn. There were no other political organizations in our precinct. Little did I know at the time, but my Bronx neighborhood was a mirror image of inner cities nationwide. I never heard anyone themselves a "conservative" and, just as surely, there were no Republican or Libertarian precinct captains in our area. I'm sure the good sisters of Our of Solace School must have mentioned that was the founder of the Republican Party, but for years I thought that that party had been killed by the Bull Moose Party at the turn of the 20th Century. Growing up, it would have never occurred to me, or anybody I knew, that political homogeneity was a bad thing. The Democratic Party was a rain maker, an employment office, and a pot hole fixer. There were no obvious reasons to question the civic monoculture or not to be a true believer.