Anyone else have hippy, liberal, and/or freethinking parents? [Archive]

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LadyShea

10-02-2004, 03:49 AM

I know Ensign Steve's mom is a total free spirit (surprise!), but it seems like most people I meet, especially online, have these conservative Bush loving folks. Anyone else like me and JD?

Ymir's blood

10-02-2004, 03:54 AM

Not me. I think the last thing my mom said to me about politics was something to the effect of, 'well we won't talk about that.'

pescifish

10-02-2004, 04:55 AM

My parents were before hippies, but I'd say they could fit the term bohemian. Really, they were both quite the oddballs, though their outward lives seemed fairly normal. They worked 25 and 30 years at government jobs. My mom was a devout hispanic Catholic, my father converted and became devout. They lived in the same house for 45 years by the time Mom died and we sold it.

But they both believed in all sorts of wild stuff. My mom was into esoteric teachings of Joseph Campbell and studied at the Los Angeles Philosophical Research Society. She believed in reincarnation and used to ask God to let her die now so that she could start over since she screwed up this life. She believed that each of us kids chose to be born into the family (hence, it was our faults, not hers, that we ended up with such a horrible mother.) My Dad had every issue of Mad magazine and we grew up on dixieland jazz and Saturday matinees at LAs Music Center. They were avid Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddysey fans. The only movies we ever went to when we were kids were foreign films (trust me, if you don't understand Fellini now, try it when you are 8 years old.)

They were most definitely Democrats, though I'm not sure how I know that; we didn't discuss politics much at home.

Dingfod

10-02-2004, 04:55 AM

Me ma is. Me pa ain't. Nobody knows what exactly me pa is. He is so secretive about his POV. I once asked him how he voted in a presidential election, he said "By secret ballot." He meant it was none of my business. Damn.

Dingfod

10-02-2004, 05:04 AM

Is this forum fucked up or what. Pesci's post still shows up as the last one. I guess we posted at exactly the same time and it doesn't know how to deal with ti.

seebs

10-02-2004, 05:51 AM

My mom's definitely a freethinker. She's actually a pretty strong fiscal conservative, and tends to vote Republican, but... She's happy to simply blow off Republican positions when they offend her sensibilities. Once, when I told her I might be getting a second wife, she said "as long as she's fertile, and everyone's consenting, it's fine with me". Very mellow attitude. :)

My in-laws are pretty mellow. Not very hippiesh, but very tolerant; for instance, when I moved in with their daughter and their son-in-law, they just started making quiet inquiries about my taste in music so they could include me in the family Christmas shopping list. :)

Adora

10-02-2004, 06:49 AM

Er, my parents are pretty regular just-slightly-left-of-center types here in Australia, but I think they'd be pretty liberal when compared to the majority of whackjobs in the US.

wade-w

10-02-2004, 01:02 PM

I have no idea what my father's political position is. I suspect he's not a very political person. I also don't know what his religious beliefs are. I think he's either an agnostic or an atheist, but he's never mentioned it in my presence.

Mom is a liberal Democrat. When I was very young she was an atheist. Once, when I was in first grade, my teacher was reading to us from the bible. When she found out, mom raised hell with the school. This was in Georgia circa 1964. Then when I was about 10 or so she converted to a new age mish mash of beliefs including reincarnation and some sort of vague "higher power." She even became a licensed (!) astrologer. It was embarrassing as hell for me every time I brought someone home. She'd start in on "When were you born? Where?" etc., take out her ephemeris and do an impromptu reading. :doh:

LadyXoc

10-02-2004, 01:34 PM

My parents think Falwell is a prophet. Probably not a high rating on the free spirit scale.

HelenM

10-02-2004, 01:44 PM

Yeah, me. They're both nontheists, actually. Ironic, huh? :D

Politically we're not far apart; they are liberal/left-leaning. I remember engaging in some defense of Bush on this forum once - with regard to something or other specific - but that doesn't actually mean I think he's wonderful, or that his policies/decisions are.

Helen

livius drusus

10-02-2004, 02:02 PM

My dad's a Republican and my mom's a Democrat, pretty much party line all the way down. They are of the "there are starving children in Europe" generation, so definitely not hippies.

Beth

10-02-2004, 02:47 PM

Nope. I was raised in an extremely conservative home. To the point that bras were called "things" because the word bra was too vulgar to say and gays were called "funny" and sex was never mentioned. In movies, I could hear my mom click her mouth anytime something ungodly was shown. Too ungodly, we had to leave, such is the case for "the Goonies" when the statue's penis was broken off. I let my kids see it when they were like 3 and own a copy. Oh, "butt" was a horrible swear word that no lady could ever say, although I was allowed to say freaking and frickin' all of the time. ;) So I suppose there was some freedom. :P

LadyShea

10-02-2004, 04:57 PM

seebs, are you saying your wife has another husband, or that you were/are polyamorous?

That's cool that your folks were tolerant of that :)

wade, your mom sounds like mine. Raising hell at schools and such. With my mom it was when they tried to ban books.

Beth

10-02-2004, 05:06 PM

LadyShea

10-02-2004, 05:18 PM

seebs

10-02-2004, 05:40 PM

seebs, are you saying your wife has another husband, or that you were/are polyamorous?

Had, past tense. I overlapped with #1 husband by about a year and a half. Still miss him sometimes; we were both straight, but he was a really, really, cool guy to hang out with.

We don't do the open relationship thing, and we have no interest in additional partners in the abstract, but we don't have a policy against them, and there's a specific person who might be moving in with us in a couple of years. We're taking things very slowly. We haven't brought it up with Jesse's parents yet -- not for fear of condemnation, but because her mom will want to talk about it, and Jesse is not a big fan of relationshit talks. (I love that coinage; New Girl brought it to us as a sort of pre-dowry.)

lisarea

10-02-2004, 06:04 PM

Yeah, both of mine.

My mom was kind of a proto-hippy type. She was in Cuba in 1959 and has an apology letter from Castro about that. She was raised a Protestant farm girl, and came out as agnostic in college. (Her old pastor at home was still soliciting her for money, so she wrote him a long letter explaining this, so the pastor called her mom and told her to come immediately. It was an emergency, about [her daughter|my mom]. So she rushed over, and the guy gravely informed her that he thought her daughter was becoming some kind of nature worshipper or something. This made my grandmother pretty angry at the church, too.)

My dad was raised by insane Catholics. Volunteered for the Navy in WWII, and got sent to the South Pacific. Came home, went to college to get a math degree, became a professional nerd. Like you see those 60s-era pictures of guys in the room with the giant supercomputers with the tape devices on the front? The guys in the short-sleeved white shirts with the horn-rimmed glasses? My dad.

They met while they were both working for Ma Bell on the first Electronic Switching System. Got married on Presidents' Day because they had the day off. My dad's family made my mom sign this paper agreeing to raise their children as Catholics, so I was baptised. But then, my mom decided she wasn't legally bound as the papers were signed under duress, and none of their subsequent babies got hosed down. We went to some Sunday school once, but I got in trouble for spitting on the floor, so I didn't have to go anymore. I'm pretty sure my dad wasn't too worried about that.

So I assume my dad wasn't religious, but the indoctrination was pretty bad, so I don't think he ever really consciously left the church. He just stopped going. He still had a rosary and some get out of Hell free cards in his underwear drawer when he died.

He was the more politically liberal of the two, though. His face would get all red and his eyes would bug out when he saw Nixon or Kissinger or Poppy Bush or Reagan. Hated 'em. He never said any real bad words, but those guys would set him to sputtering "Holy MAN! Criminutles! S-TOO-pid red-baiting... son...of...a...GUN!" He had his eye on Poppy. Said he was the real brains behind Reagan, whom he had pegged as a dumb McCarthyite puppet. Said Bush was pulling the strings. He didn't live to see Poppy elected. Had he, he probably wouldn't have lived long after. Sometimes, the veins in his forehead would pop out so far it looked like they were going to explode.

He was also a big feminist. Used to take me to work, and neither parent ever said thing one about us getting married or anything one day. I think my dad pretty actively wanted at least his daughters to not get too tangled up with that kind of thing. He assumed we'd have careers, not husbands. I used to work at this company where the CEO-founder was a big sexist pig. He was always saying dumbassed things about women. Once, when I yelled at him for it, he tried to use the "I was raised in a different time" excuse. I told him my dad was older than him, and he somehow managed not to be a dick. I won.

My mom's still a little socially conservative for my tastes. She doesn't talk to her conservative family members about her children all living in sin (as all FOUR of us are at this point), and we have the marriage argument sometimes. But she's working on it, and she's coming around. She's really only just starting to pay closer attention to politics, and she's hating on the Shrub pretty hard. She asks questions and researches things a lot, and she's starting to argue with the other old ladies instead of just listening and then complaining about them later.

I've got two brothers and a sister, and politically, we differ only in our levels of optimism from Pollyanna me, who believes that we can vote Bush out of office and then work on it from there, to my sister, who believes that we really just need to elect Pat Buchanan to bring on the coming revolution. One brother is planning a vacation on election day, so he can be in Canada. The other is thinking about moving there for good. Religion-wise, the closest we come is my baby brother, who is getting engaged to an Algerian woman who is some kind of liberal Muslim. He appears to be amenable to being a cultural Muslim or something. I think he did some kind of limited fast during Ramadan or something, even, in solidarity.

The Little Muffin and I once got into a fairly heated discussion about Marxism in a restaurant, and I remember being surprised at how effortlessly he was quoting the Communist Manifesto. My point being: I'm afraid we're actually becoming GENETICALLY LIBERAL.

It's a slippery slope, people.

Beth

10-02-2004, 06:35 PM

wade, your mom sounds like mine. Raising hell at schools and such. With my mom it was when they tried to ban books.Wow.
My mom tried to get books banned. Total opposite. All I can hope is that my kids grow up and talk about how cool I was.

Even when my mom was a Christian, she was very against censorship of any kind. In her thinking, if we as a society started banning books, eventually we would get to one of HER beloved writings. After all, the Bible is full of sex, genocide, murder, even gross decriptions of shit smearing and ejaculation.
Well, your mom was wise. I realize that not every conservative is like my mother was. I remember talking to my friend's mom when I was a kid, I repeated wwhat my mother had said on not allowing prayer in school or teachers teaching god. She explained to me that she would not want someone else to present their ideas of god in a educational setting that it was private and a parent's responsibility to teach what beliefs they wanted to present to their children. The woman was very Christian, very conservative, but also rather balanced and wise.

pzmyers

10-02-2004, 06:40 PM

Mom was a phlegmatic Scandinavian Lutheran, which meant that she was the next best thing to being an atheist, without having to say so and while still being able to attend a church once a year. She wasn't a hippy at all; wrong generation. She worked as a roller-skating waitress at the local drive-in, went to sock-hops and loved Elvis.

Dad was a liberal, all right, but not the kind you see too often anymore. He was a fire-breathing union/labor progressive, the kind that the Rethuglican narrative now has on the defensive, since they like to call 'em socialists and communists. (Once upon a time, Seattle had an amazing labor movement: wobblies and riots and lynchings and Joe Hill songs. All gone now. The triumphant shout, "Woodworkers of the World, Unite!" is nothing but a dimly heard echo, tucked away on forgotten signs on derelict buildings.) He had nothing to do with religion. It was pablum for the thoughtless, nothing more.

They were solid, ordinary blue-collar people, but would be considered rather subversive now because they also liked to read, and read books. I think what's really hurting democracy in this country now is that our middle-class has been turned into a herd of brainless know-nothings who blindly accept the feel-good cant dispensed by the glowing glass teat, and have lost sight of the virtue of the struggle.

Beth

10-02-2004, 06:44 PM

I'm afraid we're actually becoming GENETICALLY LIBERAL.
Ah, this gives me hope for my grandkids. :)

Sweetie

10-02-2004, 07:02 PM

I know Ensign Steve's mom is a total free spirit (surprise!), but it seems like most people I meet, especially online, have these conservative Bush loving folks. Anyone else like me and JD?

-My mother? That's a difficult one. I can't fit her into any box. She is an extrovert, highly intelligent, very wise, loud, knows how to live and be alive, sometimes very emotional, likes to have lots of friends, likes to party, etc. She was the second last of eight children, her younger sister was always very sick, and her mother was older so she feels as if she didn't have enough attention, she became very independent and has an extremely strong work-ethic. A black sheep, was a hippy, partied pretty hard in the seventies, been burned alot. Very capable with adding things up and using what she's learned, hindsight and foresight.

She seems to fit more in the middle, neither black nor white on any given issue. An independent thinker, not one to agree just because other people do.

Not one to tell us what to do, one to give advice and appeal to our better judgement, though that was when we were older, she was rather strict when we were younger, one who believed that healthy households needs rules, but you need to be both caring and strict, loving and strong at the same time.

A good mother, I'm pleased with her. A conservative* free-thinker if you will allow for the possibility. She can't be called liberal nor conservative, neither a free-spirit nor a bound by tradition one. The best of both worlds I think.

*Conservative- "Having power to preserve in a safe of entire state, or from loss, waste, or injury; preservative."

Ensign Steve

10-02-2004, 07:44 PM

I know Ensign Steve's mom is a total free spirit (surprise!), but it seems like most people I meet, especially online, have these conservative Bush loving folks. Anyone else like me and JD?

I'm exactly like JD! :happywave:

I love my liberal mom. I have to talk to her (and y'all) about the war and elections and shit, because there aren't too many people here that don't make me want to scream and tear out my eyeballs when they start talking about how stupid Kerry is.

LadyShea

10-02-2004, 09:29 PM

A conservative* free-thinker if you will allow for the possibility.

Absolutely. My mom was/is a bit conservative in some ways. She never wanted me to "shack-up", not because of any religious beliefs, but because she didn't want me to be with a someone afraid to commit or something. She was afraid I would get hurt I think. When I lived with Frankie, she was cool though, she didn't get any "non-committment" vibes from him I guess.

She also was pretty strict ruleswise until I had demonstrated I could be trusted not to get myself in situations where me, or others, could get hurt...so I was not given total freedom. Which is good, I was taught that freedom brings a responsibility with it, personally and as a society. That lesson stuck.

viscousmemories

10-02-2004, 09:48 PM

My Mom lived in a convent as a nun-to-be or whatever they're called from age 15-19. She has always been a devout Catholic, biblical literalist and fundamentalist Christian (if that's not redundant). My Dad grew up on the streets. Gangs, prostitution, hustling, prison, etc. Also a devout Catholic but I think he dabbled in Eastern religions a bit too. Not really sure, since my parents divorced when I was seven.

When my parents divorced my Mom (and all of us kids, natch) joined an "ecumenical, charismatic Christian community". Basically a cult, but without the Kool-Aid. If you've seen Footloose you have a good idea how I was raised. No make-up for the girls or dating for anyone until 18. No secular music, books, dances, etc. In Jr. High my Mom sent a letter to the school instructing them to send me to the library during sex-ed.

We had "Youth activities" on Saturdays, church on Sunday mornings, prayer meetings on Sunday evenings, and read the Bible and prayed before every meal. I could go on and on but I'll just stop here. My Mom is only cursorily involved with the cult anymore, but most of my siblings are too and as far as I know they're mostly fundamentalists. So um, liberal hippies? No, not exactly.

Godless Wonder

10-03-2004, 06:56 AM

JoeP

10-03-2004, 11:54 AM

They broke their transmission on a rock on the way out. My dad fixed it for them, somehow.
Now that was God's will.

livius drusus

10-03-2004, 02:34 PM

That log cabin kicks ass, GW. I seriously adore it. Oh sure, I wouldn't last more than a few hours (unless it happened to have DSL ;)), but it's gorgeous and I think your parents are way totally fucking cool to have built it with their own hands.

This is a great thread, Brandi. I'm loving hearing about everyone's nutty/brilliant/hardcore parents.

viscousmemories

10-03-2004, 05:35 PM

I'm with liv, GW. That is a really cool story. I seriously love the idea of living "off the grid" and doing it all-out pioneer style is really impressive. :yup:

LadyShea

10-03-2004, 05:54 PM

GW, that is so cool. What an experience to share! And what an accomplishment...how many people of any age can say they built their own house off the land like that.

My brother and his soon to be ex have 40 acres in Arizona. No sewer, no water, no electricity. They had planned at some point to do what your folks did. I was always slightly disappointed that they didn't...even though it's not something I would want for myself.

Dingfod

10-03-2004, 07:35 PM

LadyShea

10-03-2004, 09:08 PM

Would you believe, we had Jehovah's Witnesses stop by once?On their way to where? Holy cow, those are some dedicated missionaries, driving their car up a place that would break their transmission. Maybe god was trying to tell them something.

LOL! Really, how did they know there was even a house out there? Were they following smoke from the fireplace or what?

lisarea

10-03-2004, 09:58 PM

LOL! Really, how did they know there was even a house out there? Were they following smoke from the fireplace or what?

They probably saw it on images from the Homeland Security Blimp. JW headquarters has a direct feed.

Godless Wonder

10-04-2004, 02:46 AM

Well, it was known in the area that we were atheists, the local preacher once told my dad that "nobody ever died an atheist." while trying to convert him. I think we were the about the only atheists within a hundred miles. Well, there was one other family, my dad converted them (or at least the dad) from agnostic to atheist one time somehow when he was tuning their piano. (He had a piano tuning/repair business, sort of. I say "sort of" because it wasn't exactly a high-profit situation. He basically tuned every piano within a hundred miles (most in churches), and then they were set for the next hundred years or so as far as the locals were concerned.) Anyway, our place was a really quite a bit out of the way, about five miles off the blacktop, and 40 miles from the nearest "town," (pop. 3000 or so) you had to drive through a river, and up a god-awful hill on a rutted out old logging road. Once I took my friend up there, and I had warned him once the road was really really bad a couple months before we went up there, but I was afraid I'd oversold it. So I didn't mention the road again, just drove up the harrowing thing, .afraid he'd say something like "That road wasn't so bad." Heh. After we drove up it in the little Toyota 4x4 pickup I had at the time, I asked him what he thought of the road. He said, "Steve, I thought we were going to die." :D On the way back down, it was so bumpy the battery got tossed out of the truck. So yeah, those were some dedicated JWs out on a serious quest hunting for the extremely rare, almost unheard of Ozarkian backwoods atheists.

Ronin

10-04-2004, 04:51 AM

My Mom lived in a convent as a nun-to-be or whatever they're called from age 15-19. She has always been a devout Catholic, biblical literalist and fundamentalist Christian (if that's not redundant).

That's wild, vm.

My mother was a nun in the novitiate of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02599a.htm) in the early 1960s. Being of Native American heritage on her mother's side and hard-core Irish Roman Catholic on her father's side made for an interesting foundation.

She was disillusioned early on by some of her experiences with the Drexel crew and hit the road after a few years, guitar in hand.

In any event, some time and activity later, I was born and given to my grandparents to raise.

Grandpa was a hard-working Irish Cathaholic, who played hard and died young, and was as far from Hippydom as one could get. Gram, on the other hand (having had her ancestry converted by the Jesuits) would follow her husband to church...um...religiously, yet still possessed a native sensibility and showed me the natural connectivity of a world far more vast and wondrous than a certain dogmatic dichotomy.

My mom and step-father would later take me in and (in retrospect) raise me directly within neutral ground...and, for that, I really appreciate them.

They are now staunch Republicans and my very presence as a liberal, atheist-humanist cop causes no end of eye-opening discussions.

:yup:

On the way back down, it was so bumpy the battery got tossed out of the truck.

:bow:

That's just damn funny.

The Lone Ranger

10-04-2004, 05:08 AM

My mom used to be quite the knee-jerk Conservative. Over the years though, I've been working on her, explaining to her in detail how terrible the policies of Bush I & II have been and will be for her, her children, and her grandchildren.

Nowadays, she sends me e-mails asking, "Can you believe what those Republicans are up to now?" I've turned her into a raging Progressive.

Sadly, almost everyone else in my family is of the "Bush walks on water" brand of Conservatism.

Cheers,

Michael

viscousmemories

10-04-2004, 06:03 AM

Ronin

10-04-2004, 06:23 AM

I've never known my y donor.

It's better left alone.

HelenM

10-04-2004, 01:29 PM

I've never known my y donor.

It's better left alone.

Evidently that man's genes and the man who raised you as his son were better than he was.

Helen

HelenM

10-04-2004, 01:31 PM

HelenM

10-04-2004, 01:44 PM

Yes, yes, and yes. Well, ex-hippy, not really anymore. But when they were hippy...they were hardcore (is that possible? You be the judge.) Back in 1980 or so, they bought 40 acres of land in the Ozarks, moved out there with me and my brother (6th grade and 2nd grade). Notice I said 40 acres of land, and did not mention any house. That's because there wasn't any. No electricity, no running water, no phone, no house... no nothing. We spent that first summer and fall and a bit more of the winter than we would have liked building a log cabin (not one of those kits, I mean hacking down the trees, skinning off the bark... pioneer style.) Well, it was an adventure. They aren't hippies anymore though. After about 3 years, we came back to civilization. I really can hardly believe they did that. It was pretty damned interesting though, I'm glad they did do it.

Here's a pic of the cabin they built. (Just a digital snap of a picture from an album. That photo was taken in 1997, I think. It's held up pretty well.)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v256/cmscdj/steve/cabin.jpg

This reminds me that my parents first house was one they built in the woods in Wisconsin - they were both at the University of Wisconsin. it was some sort of summer-house/tent structure. I've seen a slide of it but I don't have one.

I think my Dad got in trouble with the US for his left-wing activities here :D Maybe that's one reason they settled in England (my Dad is British, my Mom is American (1st generation, of German Jewish descent) and they met at the University of Wisconsin. My mother's parents were from families who knew each other and were both sponsored to come to the US in the early 1930s. Once they were here my grandfather, in Louisiana, wrote to my grandmother, in California and invited her to join him. My mother and her siblings except the youngest were raised there. They were very poor for a long time, growing their own vegetables. My grandfather couldn't use his German qualifications as a lawyer here and had to retrain. They had both grandmothers living with them (because to leave them in Germany would have been a death sentence); one was great and the other one refused to learn English, never left the house, and criticized her daughter-in-law.

I should get more details about my parents when first married...and a copy of the photo of their first house...

In England they lived in a small house in a tiny village until I was eight. The village school was so small the classes were all multi-age - I think they had 3 age bands for ages 5 through 11. We didn't go to church - since we weren't Christians - and I remember wondering, at about the age of 5 or 6, why I didn't go to 'Sunday School' like my best friend. After all, I went Monday through Friday...

Helen

Godless Dave

10-04-2004, 04:44 PM

My parents are fairly liberal but completely non-hippy. My dad's only non-liberal tendency is to complain about high taxes (especially if there is a lot of government waste involved). He may have voted for Reagan in either 1980 or 1984, I'm not sure.

Liberal: racism and sexism were not tolerated in our house. Much talk from my mother about how everything is better in western Europe where they have socialized medicine, better public schools, and government subsidized higher education. Both parents opposed the Vietnam war, but not to the extent of protesting it. Both support separation of church and state (neither practices a religion).

Non-hippy: to this day my mother only listens to classical music (although she did go to a Billy Joel concert once). My dad started listening to jazz and blues about ten years ago; until then it was only classical. Their only 60s rock music is a few Simon and Garfunkel records they never listen to.

Mom insisted on dressing me pretty conservatively when I was growing up, and freaked when I got a tattoo.

Neither one would dream of voting for Bush. Dad was pretty angry about the war in Iraq. Mom hates war in general.

Another non-hippy trait of my mom: If I were to bring a girlfriend with me to visit my mom and stay at her house, we would be in separate rooms.

Blake

10-04-2004, 05:09 PM

What a lovely thread!

Yes, my parents are/were arguably all three. They were slightly older than the hippie wave--in grad school during the mid-sixties, and in Malawi in the Peace Corps from 68-70--but when they got back to Western civ they certainly made up for it. Beetle, microbus, long hair, etc. till I was four or so. (They were also new homeowners and government-employed teachers, though, not wandering poverty-stricken patchouli sellers, so perhaps not completely hippified. ;) )Then for one reason or another they drifted away from hippydom as I grew older; the hair got shorter, the VWs gave way to a Volvo, and my dad actually had the balls to tell me that he hadn't particularly enjoyed smoking pot. (Must have been when I was a teenager, to avoid any sort of parental encouragement in that direction!)

Liberal--goodness me, yes. Watching the news during the Reagan years was quite stressful. So far as freethinking goes, my dad was anti-religion, turned off by his enforced childhood southern Methodism, while my mom was an apatheist Presbyterian; they explicitly told me that anything relating to faith was completely up to my choice & discretion. That was very nice.

Mind you, once I really woke up to The State Of The World a few years ago and became radicalized, I had a reciprocal effect on my parents, so now I've pushed them past liberal and freethinking into atheist revolutionaries. :D The child can be the father of the man a couple of ways!

godfry n. glad

10-04-2004, 07:02 PM

No, yes, and partly.

I'm the one of the "hippy" generation...and I dislike the term, in that I do not self-associate as such. I was an anti-war activist and anti-nuclear weapons activist, but I never did the "back to the land" routine....but my late wife did, goats and all.

My parents were of the WWII generation. My father failed the military entrance exam, but ended up leading a survey team through the Canadian wilderness to build the Alaska-Canada Highway. His politics were colored by the family's dirt-poor farmer background and the Roosevelt administration. The CCC helped him establish his career. He was a very liberal NRA member. He was very open about cultural and linguistic differences, but he and I clashed over our attitudes about women....a construction worker, y'know. He was a hard-core civil libertarian and agnostic/atheist....his attitude about his two boys and church were that that we should not be forced, against our will, to attend any religious function. He would have preferred that we not be exposed to such "poppycock" until we were old enough to make an informed decision on our own.

My father was an old-style FDR/labor Democrat. Yeah, pretty liberal.

My mother, on the other hand, was an active member of the United Brethren of God, which during my youth, was absorbed by the Methodists to become the United Methodists. Politically, she was quite naive, and voted pretty much as my father recommended.

I have pretty much taken on my father's political and religious outlooks on the world...with a great deal more feminist tint.

godfry

viscousmemories

10-04-2004, 10:13 PM

That's wild, vm.
Yeah, I've gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the story of my Mom leaving the convent and meeting my Dad who had just gotten out of prison. She liked him because he was dangerous. Ironically, she left him for the same reason.

Actually, I think that's typical in marriage, although it doesn't always lead to divorce - that what attracts two people to each other can become what annoys them most after they've been married for a while.
Hm, I suppose I was a little too vague with that comment if I gave the impression that she left him because she found his mannerisms annoying. She was attracted to him because she thought his dark and violent past made him exciting, but when I said she left him because he was dangerous I meant it literally. She left him because of his chronic physical and sexual abuse of my siblings over the 20 years they were together.

Sweetie

10-04-2004, 10:58 PM

I've never known my y donor.

-me neither.

It's better left alone.

-and that's what I've often been told. I'd rather stir the pot.

wade-w

10-05-2004, 12:03 AM

Ronin

10-05-2004, 02:40 AM

originally posted by wade-w:

I don't see how you can make this conclusion from the information given. It could easily be the case that the "y donor" does not know that he made a donation.

Given the common notion that a pregnant female will inform the male "donor" in most cases for both financial and emotional support, I have no issue with Helen making that assumption and offering her substantively caring view regarding my life.

In any event, he knew.

originally posted by Sweetie:

-and that's what I've often been told. I'd rather stir the pot.

There are several other lives to consider in my case and they deserve my understanding and consideration.

Besides, I really need no one to validate my existence.

HelenM

10-05-2004, 03:46 PM

I've never known my y donor.

It's better left alone.

Evidently that man's genes and the man who raised you as his son were better than he was.

Helen

I don't see how you can make this conclusion from the information given. It could easily be the case that the "y donor" does not know that he made a donation.

I started another thread (http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=10650#post10650) to solicit opinion on whether most men who don't know they fathered children are irresponsible.

If so - and if Ronin's father didn't know - then I would stand by my original comments because I have no reason to think Ronin irresponsible and from the little I know, he cares about his own son.

But Ronin has already clarified that he did know. For what it's worth.

Helen

HelenM

10-05-2004, 03:53 PM

Besides, I really need no one to validate my existence.

Indeed. You think, therefore you are. :yup:

Helen

lpetrich

10-07-2004, 09:00 AM

I can't say that either of my parents was a hippie, but my mother is on the liberal side.

Here's a fun tidbit: I had narrowly escaped being baptized a Catholic. My father's mother wanted me to be baptized as one; she had been a super-Catholic. My mother wanted to go along, just to make her happy, but my father refused to, since the priest demanded that he sign a statement that I was to be raised a Catholic. Which he refused to do.

My father had been raised a Catholic, but he left that church after deciding that it was a drag. Yet he believed that one must always respect organized religion, simply because it is "respectable" or something.

My mother had been raised a Presbyterian, but Sunday School for her was mostly some housewives teaching their students Bible verses like John 3:16 and concocting odd interpretations of some of those verses. However, they seemed to know very little beyond their favorite Bible verses.

However, my mother deconverted in college, because of some of the people she met there, and because of the expanded intellectual horizons there. And she has been an atheist ever sence.