Why I tend being an independent

I grew up in Chicago, was there in the park for the convention of 1968. My old man didn't want me there, but understood why I had to be.

I was also in Chicago when a few years before that Martin Luther King was doing some housing marches and one of them was down Fullerton Avenue in our very Catholic, very Polish, and very white neighborhood.

In the days leading up to the march, our neighbors and their children, the guys I hung with and played pickup ball games with, could be heard mumbling the typical racist remarks. "What's that n--ger think he's doing?" "Let's go throw rocks at that n--ger and all his n--ger friends."

My Dad took me aside. I think he did the same with my two brothers. He told me in no uncertain terms that if I went anywhere near Fullerton Avenue, the barber strop he had hanging in the closet would be used not to hone any razor, but would definitely hone my bottom. He never took that strop out of the closet, but we all knew it was there.

He told me, "The man has a right to walk where he wants, to say what he feels."

It was the first time in my life, in that time, in that neighborhood, that I had ever heard a black man referred to as a man and not the pejorative term. I guess I never really listened to my old man before. I thought he was just like all the other yahoos in the neighborhood. Man, was I ever wrong.

My old man taught me tolerance before it was chic. He taught me the value of free expression before I read the opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes and others. He taught me to think for myself and not let my friends, or neighbors, or relatives, or anybody change what I know is right and good in my heart and soul and mind.

I like to think that my thoughts and beliefs and political leanings are a product of my own making, my own education, things I have seen and experienced over the years. And in part those things have made me an independent. Mostly, though, it was my upbringing, my old man. And maybe a barber strop that was never used.

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