There Goes My Social Life

by Stacey Dash

  By the way, when he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” he led the Republican Governors Association.

  Now I know that Republicans are not the only ones who have had their sex scandals. Of course, I’ve read all about the Anthony Weiner, Barney Frank, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Kwame Kilpatrick, Bill Clinton, and John F. Kennedy Jr. affairs and cover-ups.

  But here’s the thing.

  Republicans should have a higher standard. We should deal more honestly with our failings. We should hold ourselves to a higher criterion. Conservative voters should demand better.

  When we dismiss sexual misconduct—and crimes!—just because the predator was one of “our tribe,” it plays into the Democrats’ misleading “War on Women” meme, minimizes the pain of the victims, and is just plain wrong.

  After all, aren’t we the ones who preach about fidelity and family values?

  FIVE

  THE DECISION MAKER

  [This nation was created by people] who are free, and who mean to remain so.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  “Let’s go home.” I lived at that family’s house for about three years, until one day my dad showed up and said those three wonderful words.

  My real home was a walk-up on the fifth floor in the South Bronx. Though I hated walking up five flights of stairs, I didn’t complain. I never wanted to be sent away again. When we walked into the house, it smelled of Florida Water, citrus mixed with clove and cinnamon. By now, there was another member of the family: my little brother, who was about four months old. Darien was beautiful—big chocolate eyes and tiny little hands. I was delighted. I loved holding him and wrapping him in blankets. I was overjoyed at having a family—a real family of my own—to love.

  In the matter of one day, my life had changed. I had a mom who dressed stylishly, and who also happened to be drop-dead gorgeous. Plus, I had a slender and handsome father. I’d curl up with him on the couch and watch The Brady Bunch. He would hold me so close in his arms, and I’d breathe in the woody, masculine smell of his Aramis cologne.

  “Daddy, wake up!” I’d say when he’d invariably nod off while sitting next to me on the couch. “You’re missing the best part.”

  What I didn’t understand was that my parents—the people who had rescued me from the family’s home—were the same people who had put me there in the first place. I was too young even to read, so I certainly didn’t have the ability to process the dynamics of my very dysfunctional family. I guess, in retrospect, it wasn’t all that complicated. My parents were druggies.

  My mom smoked pot like other people smoke cigarettes. She always had marijuana in her hands, not that she suffered from a lack of versatility. She smoked coolies, which are joints with coke inside. Or, she’d put cocaine in regular cigarettes. Or, to switch it up a bit, she’d sometimes simply freebase. My dad’s drug of choice was heroin, which is why he always fell asleep before Jan Brady had a chance to whine, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Since I was only five, I just figured he was tired from working so hard. Somehow, he had secured a job at Harlem Hospital as a—wait for it—drug rehabilitation expert.

  Even though I was not yet old enough to count proper change, my mother used to send me to the store to pick up cigarettes and milk for her. I realized that I was no one’s priority.

  My mother’s brother, Uncle Ferdinand, was the only exception. Even though I was a small kid, he’d take me aside and teach me little life lessons.

  Don’t be anybody’s trick.

  Don’t settle.

  You can do anything you want.

  You’re special.

  Your life doesn’t have to be limited to the Bronx.

  When the Jesus train comes, make sure you’re on it.

  Uncle Freddy was always at the house, always looking out for me, and always surrounded by beautiful women. In the neighborhood, he had a certain swagger. Everyone showed him loyalty, honor, and respect. And people who didn’t follow that code had to pay the consequences.

  When Uncle Freddy and I walked down the street, people on the sidewalk stepped out of the way, made sure they said hello to him, and made sure they shook his hand. When I sat on the front stoop of my building, I’d hear people say, “Don’t go over there. That’s Freddy’s niece.” (Later, I can’t tell you how many cute boys didn’t come talk to me because of my relationship with Uncle Freddy.)

  He seemed to be the only person in my life who cared about teaching me how to live. He gave me a vision to see beyond the Bronx, to dream larger dreams, and to never ever let people boss me around. Plus, he was hilarious. “Hey Stacey,” he said. “Did I tell you the one about the parrot who kept getting annoyed his owner offered him a cracker?” Then he’d go into a long joke—more like a story than a joke—and throw his head back laughing at his own profane punch line.

  He was really the one who should’ve been responsible for me. But he wasn’t my parent. One night, Uncle Freddy was over at my house, along with my aunts, other uncles, and a few other people. The place was hopping. My dad put a record on, and everyone was smoking, drinking, and laughing. I sat in front of the television in a room adjacent to all of the festivities. Back then, television sets weren’t meant to sit unobtrusively above a fireplace or hang discreetly on a wall. Instead, they were big pieces of furniture that took up half the room. There was a little space between the screen and the wood casing that held our television. After a few hours, I’d grown tired of watching cartoons, so I went up to the glass screen and put my hand on it. I’m not sure how, but I got my little pointer finger stuck between the glass and the case.

  “Mommy!” I cried out. “Daddy!” I could feel my pulse in my finger. It was so firmly lodged in that small, unforgiving space that I didn’t know what to do. “Help!”

  But no one heard my small voice above the cacophony of the party. I cried and cried, as loudly as I could, but the laughter and music drowned out my voice. That’s when I realized nobody was listening. I was alone. One hour passed, then another. Finally, I decided to stop screaming, simply because I’d run out of energy. It wasn’t helping anyway.

  Was anyone ever going to come for me?

  Then I heard a voice—not above the noise of the party, but instead of the noise of the party. Though it was different, it was a voice as clear as anyone’s I’d ever heard. Immediately, I recognized it as the voice of God.

  “It’s just you and Me. Pull your finger out.”

  And so, I took a deep breath and ripped my finger from the television. The skin peeled back and blood began to pour down my hand. I walked into the room where my parents were, and my aunt gasped.

  “Linda, come quick!” she said, alerting my mother.

  I never told them how long I’d been screaming for them. As my mom hastily washed my hand off and put a bandage on my finger, I looked at all of her friends. They were holding half empty glasses, looking through squinted eyes, laughing at things that were obviously not funny, and stumbling around.

  This is it. I thought. I don’t want to be like any single solitary one of you.

  But that incident gave me more than just a determination not to be a partier. It confirmed that I was—in fact—not alone even when it seemed like I was. This was knowledge I would come to rely on, time and time again.

  I didn’t have the security of knowing where I was going to lay my head at night. Once, my parents took me to my babysitter’s house for a nap and didn’t return for a week. Another time, they dropped me off with my cousins and didn’t come back for a month. And when I was home, things weren’t that great anyway. My parents would get into raging arguments that would chill me to the bone.

  One morning after a terrible late-night argument—Darien was in his crib, I was watching television, and my teenaged cousins were watching us—my dad told us on his way out the door for work, “Don’t wake your mother. She’s sleeping.”

  She was always sleeping.

  However, a five-year-old was going to let her mother rest only so long. I was hu
ngry, and I wanted my mother. Sometimes, when my parents were sleeping, I’d wake up, watch cartoons in the dark, and eat cake all day. It was the only food I could find.

  After Dad left, I crept into my mother’s bedroom and crawled into her bed.

  “Mommy,” I whispered. “My stomach’s growling.”

  Her eyes were shut, and her mouth was slightly open.

  “Mommy!”

  She wasn’t waking up. I got on top of her and started shaking her.

  “Mother!”

  When I realized she wasn’t waking up, I took my little fingers and pried open her eyes. They were rolled back in her head, so I started screaming.

  “Help!” I yelled to my cousins. I couldn’t control myself. I didn’t know anything about drugs or suicide, but I’d seen death, and I knew I was looking at a shadow of it once again. My cousins ran in and found me screaming while sitting on top of my mom. Next thing I knew, she was being taken away in an ambulance, and Darien and I were sent to my grandparents’ house on Long Island.

  That was fine by me. They had an acre of land and a teeny house that I saw as a mansion. There was a tall fence behind their house and a sprawling forest—a fun place to explore during the day, but I was always careful to come home before twilight. I had heard the story of Hansel and Gretel, and I didn’t want any part of being lost in the woods. My grandmother served us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which we’d eat at a table . . . not in front of the television. My grandmother was always singing and tap dancing. She would teach me the steps, and we’d belt out duets. They signed me up for tap dance class, and then came to watch me practice every Saturday. I loved it and was good at it. That’s when I really got the dance bug.

  Once, during the year that we stayed there, Dad came to visit. I watched him as he put his luggage down in his room. There, in his things, I noticed his bag of drug paraphernalia. I didn’t know what the bag contained, but I resented the way the contents seemed to make him act. So I took his gear, climbed the fence behind my grandparents’ house, went out into the woods about half a mile, and buried it.

  That night, I was sitting on the bed as he unpacked and we chatted about the day. He became increasingly distracted.

  “What’s wrong,” I asked. “Did you lose something?”

  Dad dumped the whole bag onto the floor, his hand rifling through socks and tee shirts like he was searching for a grenade that might go off any second.

  “No, I’m just unpacking,” he said. Then he turned and looked at me. “Did you take something out of here?”

  “Like what?” I asked. He must’ve sensed I was up to something.

  “Stacey!” he yelled, grabbing me by my shoulders and shaking me. “Tell me!”

  Even though it was already dark, I ran out into the yard, horrified. I’d never seen him like that. I went out to the fence, placed my feet in the slots, and flipped over it. By retracing my steps from that morning and feeling around, I eventually found the place where I had buried his drugs. I still didn’t understand what was in this package, but I knew that my dad really needed it.

  I returned with the drugs and plopped them on the bed. He grabbed the bag and began digging through it like a man in the desert lunging for water.

  So, no.

  I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I wasn’t raised being taught Republican principles. I never heard my parents or friends talking about politics, because it was downstream from where we lived. But Margaret Thatcher said it best. “The facts of life are conservative.” I think I know what she meant.

  When my parents decided to do drugs, there was a consequence for them, for me, for our community.

  Consequences. That’s something I’ve tried to teach my kids. Consequences are embedded into the way the world works. Liberals try to dull them by coming into our communities with programs to help. Whatever problem you have, the government has a mealy-mouthed, ineffective solution. Let’s take a look at what the government has already done, supposedly to help people like me with one of the problems I encountered as a kid: rampant drug use. While I appreciate that the government wants to get people out of that horrible cycle, their well-intentioned program has turned into a quagmire. Over the past forty years, the federal government has spent over $1 trillion on the War on Drugs with almost nothing to show for it. That’s $51,000,000,000 per year.1

  And the social costs are even more staggering. Between 2001 and 2010, 8 million marijuana-related arrests were made. Not only do these arrests cost millions of dollars, they also brand many black kids as criminals forever. A recent study showed that blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to face arrest for pot-related offenses. I know what you’re thinking: black people do and sell more drugs. Not so fast. The study showed that blacks smoke pot at the same rate as their white friends.2 Fifty-seven percent of those in state prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.

  Undoubtedly the “war on drugs” has caused the number of incarcerated Americans to skyrocket.3 In 2013, there were 2,220,300 people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. That’s one in every ten adults! Did you know America has the highest incarceration rate in the world?4

  Last, the heavy-handed government show of force in the War on Drugs has done a lot to make America look more and more like a police state.

  This is what happens when the government tries to save us from ourselves. I guess we should marvel that it only took them forty years to fail this miserably. Growing up surrounded by drugs and addiction, I didn’t have a political bone in my body. Yet I knew from experience that the government wasn’t going to help me find a better life. I was the person best positioned to solve my own problems.

  The Founders knew this. The Declaration of Independence says we have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I’ve always liked that they selected a very accurate word: pursuit.

  No one’s going to serve it to you on a silver platter. But—in America—you can at least chase happiness. This is the essence of self-governance, which means solving problems as close to the individual as possible. When government bureaucrats start making decisions from their mahogany desks in D.C.—far away from the problems that afflict us—their solutions usually make everything worse. And it’s not just Democrats who come up with stupid solutions. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Compassionate Conservative No Child Left Behind George W. Bush.)

  Tea Party Patriots founder Mark Meckler said, “America was designed to be a self-governing society, where decisions are made as close to home as possible. Things have changed since Jefferson put down his quill. The government has encroached into every area of life, so infiltrating our culture that we endlessly debate the policies our so-called leaders have decided for us.”

  He’s right. I wonder how Jefferson would feel if he were transported into this nation now and picked up a newspaper.

  “Obamacare?” he might ask. “Why did you let this happen? Have you even read the Constitution?”

  There’s no telling what Jefferson would say about how the IRS isn’t even trying to hide the fact that they targeted, intimidated, and bullied Tea Party, Christian, and pro-Israel groups. The federal government—under President Obama’s “leadership”—effectively undermined ordinary Americans’ ability to speak out on causes they believe in by frightening them about their tax returns and burying them in paperwork during a crucial presidential election. The president hamstrung conservative organizations’ ability to organize and to express their opinions about issues that are pressing in on us today.

  And I’d hate to see Thomas Jefferson’s face when he learned that we have $19 trillion in national debt.

  Here’s what I have learned. Limited government protects liberty best. The Founders created the “checks and balances” system so that the various government branches don’t get so powerful and onerous that they take away our liberty. The federal government isn’t supposed to act in areas that aren’t authorized in the Constitution. But politicians think they’re
smarter than our Founders. Checks and balances? they think. That’s so old-fashioned. Consequently, the federal judiciary enthusiastically holds the hand of Congress and the White House as they erode the sovereignty of the fifty states and the American people.

  It’s up to citizens to take a stand and to seize back the power the bloated federal government has taken from us. It’s up to individuals to plant their feet firmly on the ground and reclaim their lives.

  Who decides?

  According to the Founders and the Constitution, the citizens should make the decisions that affect their lives.

  That’s why I didn’t let my family or my upbringing define my life. Thankfully, I was born in a nation that gave me another option: freedom.

  SIX

  EDUCATION, THE GREAT INTEGRATOR

  Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

  —George Washington Carver

  I confess: I’m self-taught.

  I’ve been teaching myself through reading newspapers, National Review, and many books like The Fountainhead, The Alchemist, Hamlet, and The Story of O. Through my self-teaching, I feel like I’m putting myself through college without having to put up with liberal professors trying to indoctrinate me with the elite nonsense of higher education . . . lessons they teach that might sound sort of reasonable in the classroom but that would never make sense on the street.

  No, I didn’t go to a single college, but I made up for that by attending so many elementary schools and high schools. Because my parents moved me around a lot, I went to schools in New York, California, and New Jersey. I went to public schools and private schools. I’ve lost count of all of the schools I’ve attended, and the ones I remember I can’t always recall the names of. (It doesn’t help that New York City schools go by number.) I never went to one school for more than two consecutive years of my life. By the time I was six, my parents were sending me to my third school.