Seeing Blue, Feeling Blue

I did grow up in the Northeast but I have yet to experience the people labeled as the “elites” or morally inferior. My neighborhood was at the lower half of the middle class spectrum. It would be more likely to find a Chevy Nova on blocks in the driveway of a house in my neighborhood than it would to find a Benz or a Beamer. I went to public schools. When I was a kid I would go to morning mass every weekday, and once on Sunday. My father didn’t work on Wall St., he worked on Main St. My mother was a stay at home mom for much of my childhood. After graduating from public school I went to community college and from there, state school. I paid for it all and I still am.

We grew up in a worse area then some and a nicer area then others and I had friends who liked to hunt but not one of them felt the need to regularly carry a gun. I was taught that the respect for life should be complete, that life begins at conception, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” no matter if it’s war or capital punishment. I was taught morals and a value for life. I was taught to act in the image of Christ, that justice is integral to society, as is food, shelter and health care.

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my ass. I didn’t go to private school or an Ivy League school like Yale or Harvard. My father wasn’t a senator in the government, he was a deacon in the church. My house had visiting poor Vietnamese and black people living in it, not maids and hired help. We didn’t go to Kennebunkport for Thanksgiving; we delivered food to the needy. On Christmas we went to church, like we did every Sunday and we always prayed before every meal. We never got everything we wanted on Christmas day or on any other day for that matter. We were taught that if you wanted something bad enough you worked for it. The few times that we went on vacation we didn’t get on a plane and head out to our 1000 acre ranch, we got in our car and drove to a cabin within the same state.

Life wasn’t easy on us. Drugs, suicide and violence affected people where I lived in a real way. The men that lived in my neighborhood were the guys that actually fought in the Vietnam War. They were the guys who regularly rushed into burning buildings and when those 2 big ones collapsed in Manhattan, they were the guys who died. Family, where I grew up, was a priority and the glue that held us on the brink of sanity.

No, I don’t know any northeastern elites or moral degenerates. I’ve known a bunch of decent people living life the best they can, who value their family and their God. They may not always agree with you but that’s probably because they’ve lead a tough, different kind of life than most are used to. They have a different perspective on things that’s rooted in where they’ve come from, what they’ve seen with their own eyes, and heard with their own ears.

And they don’t know how truly good they are.