The thing for me was the realization from the first time my parents started taking me on trips to the rest of the country (and for those who don’t know ..even upstate New York is a VERY different world from the NYC area), I knew I wanted out. Even at that time I knew I was meant to be in a less urban place. My teenage rebellion if you want to call it that was to want to be on my own as young as I could and not just follow the “Nice Jewish Boy from the burbs” path of “go to a good college, then move on to become a doctor or a lawyer.” Politically I was Alex B. Keaton. I hated the Sing Kumbaya Orthodoxy even back then. My first activism was as a Student Govt. member at SUNY Stony Brook working to remove the forced “activity fee” payments to NYPIRG, the Ralph Nader PIRG there. We lost btw.

When I got married, it was with the condition that we be out of the NYC area within 3 years. When that time I came I told my wife I was going with her or without her. She eventually showed up

Haven’t heard much from him lately..

Regards

My daughter was raised mostly as an urban creature in ATL and Anchorage but we still got out in the woods a lot. We both worked so she was a latchstring kid and if she was supposed to be home by 3:30, if she hadn’t called by 3:40, I took off and was headed home. That’s one thing I really liked about Juneau, you didn’t have to worry about her safety here other than the things you worry about with any teenaged girl. When you have a boy, you worry about one boy in the neighborhood, when you have a girl, you worry about ALL boys in the neighborhood.

Now, my step kids are another story; you couldn’t get them out of the house with a cattle prod! They all had to have 21 speed mountain bikes but the only time any of them ever saw dirt was for a couple of years there was about a three foot dirt gap between the end of my paved driveway and the paved road. Hated camping, hated going out on the boat - no TV. Now that they’re older they like the boat, especially if I’m buying the gas.

No mink habits and only one joint which my hippie brother-in-law talked me into. Not that I didn’t have plenty of opportunity for both, heh heh.

It is such a shame that my son, and now his children, never knew the joy of running around on a dusky summer evening with a crowd of other neighborhood kids, catching lightening bugs, playing Red Rover and Hide and Seek with not a single parent worried about where we were or what we were doing.

I sorta went back and forth; too freak to be a Greek, too Greek to really be a freak. But I was a musician and had a bit of a taste for “recreational substances” and that like a mink thing janis was talking about. Never was much into the politics. Didn’t want to go to Vietnam, but not so much that I did anything to keep from going other than stay in school.

Unless you went through it, you don’t know what small town draft boards were like; my hair was just long enough that every time I went home somebody would see me and the Board would reclassify me 1-A and I’d have to go through the drill to get my 2-S back. That’ll give you an attitude! But, nevertheless, I was still way to much the “Country Boy” with all that entailed to get into what was essentially an urban culture of the counter-culture. Anyway, I just stopped going home and when I wasn’t in school, I was in Atlanta or NO or down in FL making music; there’ll forever be a place in my heart for FSU coeds! Anyway, I hated school and when the lottery came along and I had a high number, I quit. By that time I was married (Georgia coed, not FSU), soon had a kid, and all that stuff just faded to gray.

As I have said here before, September 11, 2001 finished the job and, like AKSteveB said last night, I completely fell off the fence and never looked back. Once that happens, everything else falls into place and life becomes so much easier.

Now my parents can’t believe how involved in politics I have become and how ardent a conservative I am. Funny, that.

Goodness, wouldn’t that be one for the books? Or, perhaps, as the line goes, “Goodness had nuthin’ to do with it.”

While many of us participated to one degree or another in the drug culture, most who did so left that behind to work, marry, have kids, and just grow up. To blame that generation wholesale for every single bad thing that is happening now is ridiculous. For most of us who grew up then, we knew an America that was much more free than it is today, and political correctness was just a distant malignancy on the horizon. We were allowed to take all kinds of chances growing up, from tree-climbing, to having BB guns, to bike-riding without a helmet, to running all over the neighborhood or countryside with siblings or friends. If you deserved an F on something at school, you got one. When you made an A, you knew that you had earned it. Self-esteem was earned by working for it.

So for that generation, I will speak for them here:

We are sickened beyond belief by what is happening to our country. And we are willing with everything we have and are to fight to stop this destruction of everything we hold dear. And you can be assured that it will be Boomers who are more than prepared to do exactly that—put it all on the line and bleed if that’s what it takes to save this land.

When you get tired of threats and having children shot while sleeping in their bed, you will sign.
(All documented by our New Yawk Lawyers.)

During 2 organizing drives that I dealt with,the Stealworkers got plenty of cards signed, then mysteriously, when the secret ballot occurred, they always came up short.

Imagine that.

Card check is a free ride in anywhere they please.
Threats and intimidation work fairly well.

Card check is a bigger deal than most folks think.

Regards

The Sixties weren’t nearly as wild as they are portrayed. None of the acid rock or political bands ever dominated the charts. The Billboard #1 song of ‘65 was Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” The Beatles and Stones had some hits once they moved to more political themes but by the late Sixties their heyday was behind them. Only the hardcore listed to the hard core or went to the demostrations or burnt draft cards or any of that stuff; its just that even a very small percentage of such a large group is still a very large group. Most of the children of the sixties finished high school or college, got married, got a job, had kids and tried to make it in the world of 20% mortgages and 10% inflation; the Seventies and early Eighties were hard on both marriages and attitudes.

The overwhelming cultural changes came after the Sixties and only somewhat because of them. The draft kept a lot of people in college and got lots of people degrees they shouldn’t have and wouldn’t have gotten under other circumstances. A lot of those people who stayed in school to dodge the draft and got those PhDs were dedicated Lefties and they’ve become moreso in the ensuing years, they just dress better and can talk longer without dropping an F-bomb. There were enough of them to fundamentally change the educational system and academic culture, the results of which you are now seeing in Obamunism.

A Caucasian is a terrible thing to waste…

how about a United white, male, professional construction worker College fund?

Dick cheney the doberman…lol

You think I’m joking? The Block Safety Committees are forming now.

Both aspects are very bad.

In reality, the 50% recognition piece is the less important piece of the legislation. First, a union needs either overwhelming support or overwhelming apathy in the membership. A union needs compelled dues as quickly as possible after recognition: it costs a lot to organize a unit and negtiate the first agreement. If they only have 50% of the employees on board with them and try to put the whole unit under a compelled dues system, they have a built in dissident group that can make the leadership miserable and make it difficult to ratify agreements. I’ve held all along that the big companies won’t oppose this legislation so long as they can be assured that their competitors will be organized as well. They don’t care what labor costs so long as it costs their competitors the same.

The important part of EFCA is the compelled arbitration. Any union would sacrifice the card check piece in a heartbeat to know that if they could win an election, they’d have an agreement undoubtedly with a union security clause within 120 days or so and security for the next two years. That takes away the employer’s primary tool for decertifying a new union; dragging out the negotiations until the current one year insulation period is over. Then if after a year there is no agreement, nobody much is paying dues, and if the employer has been smart, the workforce has lost its ardor for the union, the employer moves to decertify the union as the exclusive representative.