I know the bloggers at Raising Kane do not want to address this but Jim Webb does have a serious woman problem. How do I know? I use Jim's own way to scope out how people feel, I ask my family - and my 85-year-old mother has serious reservations about Jim Webb. This was after I told her about "Born Fighting" - the book he wrote about her own heritage, the Scots-Irish. Even after I told her that he had Hodges in his family (one of my Mom's family names) she didn't come around. My mother doesn't like the stuff Webb wrote about women in the military. His statements today during the debate were not quite enough to sway her.
To give some background, my mother's family was from the mountains of Southern New York State and her parents came down to the DC area after WWI to make a living. My Mom's family was poor people very similar to the Southern Appalachian people, and they lived in the Catskill town of Liberty, NY. The women worked as seamstresses and the men with whatever trades they could get. Later the Jewish community came to this area to establish tuberculosis sanatoriums, which was before the comedy clubs so popular there today.
My grandfather's family was from Binghamton, NY. He left home at 13 to join the circus, because from a family of 11 and being the eldest, he had to go out and fend for himself. Eventually he went to plumbing school in NYC. My grandfather was the first plumbing inspector for Alexandria, VA. He also put in the plumbing for Fort Belvoir and was a Mason who had a hand in building the famous Masonic Temple in Alexandria that sits near where the King Street metro goes today.
When my father went off to war as an Army officer and spent 2 years on Guadalcanal as an Army Captain of a trucking company, my mother got a job in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA - the same as its called today, but it was actually a Torpedo Factory - my teenage mother helped make torpedoes there during WWII. The women worked so hard in that factory that the men (those who didn't go off to war) complained that the women had increased production too much. That good old Scots-Irish spirit to fight the war had invaded them too. They were fighting along side their men as best they could.
So this is the background from which my Mother perceives - and so with all the things I've told her about how similar Jim Webb is to our own family's life in working our way up, she still has trepidations. She needs Jim Webb to understand that when their men go off to war the women continue fighting, in what ever form they need to. And I hope someone will send him this blog and he will read about my family as I have read about his and understand where we come from.
At the rally at Robinson Middle School I was happy to greet again the first woman to be elected to the US. Congress from Virginia, Leslie Byrne. And I had worked on her campaign with a dozen Woodbridge housewives and schoolteachers in 1992 and we were rewarded not only with our Congresswoman but also with a wonderful articulate President who turned things around economically and actually helped me get a new career in IT and independence from my family.
So this is where I come from, Mr. Webb. I esteem you but you have a problem with women, so you need to address this. Ask your good friend Leslie Byrne. She'll guide you along the way.
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