Beau of the Fifth Column: Let's talk about finding your community network....

[TexasTowelie]

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Finding your 'base'...

[TexasTowelie]

2. I'd probably would be more interested in finding my base if my mobility wasn't as limited.

I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable asking anyone to visit the apartment because my brother keeps the living room in a constant state of turmoil. I can barely navigate around the half of the living room leading from the balcony and front door to my bedroom and the kitchen. I would need to use a walker to get into my brother's bedroom and I'd have to hope not to trip over about a dozen electrical cords to get there.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. Good Grief! Tell me about it!

But I'm also pretty fortunate. Turns out my childhood friends who I still keep up with (from summer camp) would all fit in here. I had no clue about politics when I was a kid (though when I was really little, my Dad had me join him in the voting booth and would lift me up to push the levers though he told me which ones - though God only knows who I voted for, LOL!).

But I do remember that we had a presidential election one summer at camp - and the couple who ran the camp (I'm still good friends with their daughter) were thrilled with the outcome - I believe it was Eugene McCarthy, not that it meant much to me to the time!

[TexasTowelie]

4. I have no doubt that I'm the most liberal of the 70 students that were in my high school class.

There was one Hispanic guy that was my neighbor and one year behind me who is liberal, but he lives in California now. There may be other Democrats that I went to high school with, but I'm inclined to believe that they are the Hispanic students and political moderates.

Most of my friends from college are liberal and probably about one-quarter of them are to my left of me politically (a mix of Marxists and anarchists). While I agreed with that crowd on certain issues, I tended to be more pragmatic in my approach to politics.

I never went to vote with my parents and the closest that we came to being involved in politics was when my father ran for the school board. He lost since we were "newcomers" in that we had only lived there about ten years, but he did have the backing of the county judge who we were neighbors with when I first moved to town. People in that town weren't considered old-timers unless their families lived there for 30 years or more.