Origins and Politics

 Origins and Politics

 My mother was born in Poland early in the 20^th century, and legally immigrated to Chicago to join her sister.  She travelled to the U.S.  in steerage of the ocean liner Rijndam, along with myriad other immigrants from Europe.  She became an American citizen in the 1930’s.  She had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education in Europe.  She was a Roman Catholic and a Roosevelt democrat. 

 My father came from a hard-scrabble New England farm family whose parents also originally emigrated from Poland.  He was one of five living siblings.  One other died.  He had an eighth-grade education before he went to work to help support his family.  To the best of my knowledge, my father was areligious and apolitical, and relied on himself in life.  He would quip that the WPA of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration actually stood for “We Poke Around”.

 I started doing odd jobs and farm work at age twelve, and had a full-time, eight hours a day, forty hours a week, full time job in a cotton mill while enrolled in the scientific course in high school.  In addition to work and school, I embarked on a search for the meaning of life by reading everything that I could find on theology, philosophy, psychology, metaphysics and on and on.

 I was raised as a working class Catholic, and was immersed in this life.  In the meantime, I was observing some of the hypocrisy of the conservative Polish Catholic church that my family attended, while learning about other belief systems, and in fact about the lack of a personal belief system.  I also was part of the blue-collar working world, and gained an appreciation of the working man’s view of life.

 From all of this I concluded that I personally was not able to sustain any particular belief system or religion, so I became agnostic.  As far as the working class was concerned, I appreciated and sympathized with some views, but I personally, did not want to continue as a blue-collar worker for the rest of my life.  There were two avenues out of this.  The military and college.  Since I finished third in my high school class of one hundred plus, I was directed toward college and engineering by the principle of my high school.

 Politically, early on, I was independent and self-reliant, so I trended away from the socialist camp and more toward the libertarian and conservative, where I pretty much still sit some eighty years later.

 I eventually returned to Christianity, not as a Catholic, but as a practicing Methodist.

 So, I consider myself an intellectual and an open-minded person who tries to cut through the bullshit of modern life, both right and left.  Finding more bullshit and nonsense to the left of politics, I normally find more reality to the right.

 Ray Gruszecki

September, 2023