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John Sanchez Jr.

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I am a lifelong resident of the Chicago suburbs, with a several year hiatus to serve in the Navy when my Vietnam era draft notice turned up. I had been told that guys with last names like mine were among the preferred cannon fodder in the Army, so the additional time required for service in the Navy seemed well worthwhile.

After military service, I worked variously in petroleum refining, for myself as an architectural illustrator just in time for electronic media to displace the ink and watercolor images that were my specialty, and doing electronic technical drawing.

To more important issues, I married lucky, which is to say once and forever, and after thirty years still marvel that she keeps me around. We have two children, a daughter with a daughter of her own, and a son who is just coming into his majority.

My wife did tire of my shouting at the television set and suggested that if I feel so strongly about politics, I should be involved. That is when I started a prolific run of commentary on this site interspersed with a few articles, and joined my local Democratic Party organization. To my wife's chagrin, I still shout at the television set.

I believe that the liberal values I hold are the result of a proper upbringing, and those values are simply what my mother, like most mothers, taught to their children. Among those values was a love of country and an admonishment to stand up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves. I still hold the part of my military oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic", to be sacred.

I keep the Jr. in my name to spare my father, whom I am fortunate enough to still have in this world, from being misidentified as responsible for my rants.

OpEd News Member for 913 week(s) and 5 day(s)

42 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 5668 Comments, 31 Diaries, 3 Polls

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8 Quotations

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Along with ordinary happenings, we fellows in Wall Street had the fortunes of war to speculate about, and that always make great doings on a stock exchange. It's good fishing in troubled waters.    By Daniel Drew    [fullquote]


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There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. -Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Mother Night, 1961    By Vonnegut Jr. Kurt    [fullquote]


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You damned fools. You can either vote for me for mayor or go to Hell!    By John Wentworth    [fullquote]


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You can always count on the Republicans, in an election year, to remind the people of what the Republican Party really stands for. You can always count on them to make it perfectly clear before the campaign is over that the Republican Party is the party of big business, and that they would like to turn the country back to the big corporations and the big bankers in New York to run it as they see fit. They are just not going to do it. Just leave them alone, and the Republicans will manage to scare the daylights out of the farmer and the wage earner and the average American citizen. They always do that.... This year they are at it again. The Republicans think they have been so successful with their campaign of smears and character assassination that they have the Democrats on the run. And they just can't restrain themselves enough to hide their true colors until after the election. They are too impatient. First one way and then another they are giving themselves away.... The main body of the Republican leaders are doing just what they do every election year. They are making it good and plain to the American people that so far as domestic policies are concerned, the Republican Party is the party of reaction and the party of special privilege.... Now, we can always rely on the Republicans to help us in an election year, but we can't count on them to do the whole job for us. We have got to go out and do some of it ourselves, if we expect to win. The first rule in my book is that we have to stick by the liberal principles of the Democratic Party. We are not going to get anywhere by trimming or appeasing. And we don't need to try it. The record the Democratic Party has made in the last 20 years is the greatest political asset any party ever had in the history of the world. We would be foolish to throw it away. There is nothing our enemies would like better and nothing that would do more to help them win an election. I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign. But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are -- when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people -- then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again. We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party. More than that, I don't believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart. There is something more important involved in our program than simply the success of a political party. The rights and the welfare of millions of Americans are involved in the pledges made in the Democratic platform.... And those rights and interests must not be betrayed. These are some of the principles for which the Democratic Party stands.... We stand for better education, better health, greater opportunities for all. We stand for fair play and decency, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the cherished principle that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty. Taken together, these principles are the articles of the liberal faith. I am sure that the liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans. It sometimes happens that circumstances of time and place combine to deny its expression. But the faith is there, and the reactionaries can never hope to have any but temporary advantage in this country.    By Harry S. Truman    [fullquote]


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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.    By Abraham Lincoln    [fullquote]


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If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.    By Abraham Lincoln    [fullquote]


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There are some who maintain that trade will regulate itself, and it is not to be benefitted by the encouragements or restraints of government. Such persons will imagine that there is no need of a common directing power. This is one of those wild speculative paradoxes, which have grown into credit among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.    By Alexander Hamilton    [fullquote]


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Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned.    By Anonymous    [fullquote]


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