Lately in American political discourse, there’s been an increasing tendency to use the word “Socialist” as a bogey-man threat around policies people don’t like, or even as a slur against people.
This rampant fear-mongering would be bad enough, but using the word “Socialist” as if it were the worst thing you could ever call a person makes me even more annoyed.
My late grandfather, Harold Luxemburg, was a Socialist. In fact, one of the earliest mentions of his name in the New York Times was June 2, 1934, when he and some of his fellow Socialists got arrested for forming a picket line in front of a Brooklyn bakery they were trying to unionize.
Scary stuff, right? Um, no.
Grandpa worked all his life for the rights of people who didn’t have many. He could have had an easier time of it had he chosen some less contentious profession, but instead he saw poverty and discrimination and unfairness all around him and decided to do something about it. He worked to improve the lives of milkmen and restaurant workers and janitors, and he always rooted for the underdog.
In his private life he was a kind, intelligent, and caring man with a strong work ethic who valued education and cultural literacy extremely highly, and loved spending time with his family. And sadly, he left us in 1990. To this day I miss him and am proud of him.
So to the Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh loving troglodytes who think that “Socialist” and “Socialism” are a slur and gleefully hurl those words around as if they actually had the power to hurt (if any of you should happen to find your way to this little corner of the Internet) — with all due respect I say, you don’t have a clue. My grandfather the Socialist was a better man than any of you.
