Joel P. Jaqubino
November 2, 2018
I have been drawn to politics for most of my life. I grew up in Southern California to a blue collar father who worked in the steel mills and on the railroad. My mother is, and has always been a free and feisty spirit. She ingrained me with a great deal of the independence I have.
Growing up in Fontana, CA as a young child, I witnessed what a mill shut down and subsequent layoffs can have on a community. But, witnessing the strength and raw determination of my father to build a better life for us was the lesson I walked away with.
My mother struggled greatly as well, but with substance and alcohol abuse. She was a victim of domestic violence from her second husband, not my father, as were my brother and I, but she always found a way to persevere. She got and has remained clean and sober and ended the violent relationship she was in. To this day she’s the inspiration for my abstinence from alcohol and drugs.
These were the building blocks that my life was built upon. It is on this very foundation that I had to make decisions to keep building, to keep growing, and to pass on a strong foundation for my children. I have always been curious of how life's circumstances, though similar, can lead to very different paths and learning experiences for people. Adversity can breed more adversity. It can also forge a strong armor and an iron will.
I say all that to get to this. We are not here to dig too deep into life and all of the BS that swirls around. But what we are doing is taking a little piece or segment of our lives and relating it to politics and social discourse. The core Contributors of this site come from very diverse backgrounds. The one commonality is our involvement in the punk and hardcore music scenes. I have 43 years on this earth so far and 31 of those have been spent involved in the scene in one way or another. But it is just a building block or a piece of what has made me who I am today. I am a husband, a father, a Catholic, and a lawyer. I am all these things and more. The question we keep in mind as we write is how all these things are impacted and also impact our involvement and influence from the scene.
I will let the other contributors share their experiences with you. For me, the scene coupled with my childhood provided a strong independent streak in me. I recall early on listening to Reagan Youth and loving the music, but not feeling the lyrics. Then came bands like Agnostic Front. Loud, hard, fast, and patriotic. Their lyrics resonated with me. I developed a sense of what I call "healthy nationalism", not based on race or other inherent characteristics, but based on the idea that we are better together than a part. I drifted to the Straight Edge scene and found myself fascinated with the positive ethos of the early bands. Although not Straight Edge, damn cigarettes, until many years later, bands like Insted, Outspoken, and others spoke to me in ways other bands did not. Years later I would find myself listening to bands like 411. 411 was fronted by one of the larger than life frontmen of the time, Dan O’Mahoney. He would sing songs about marriage equality before it became acceptable to do so and he had skinheads singing along to the lyrics! Although politically I diverge from many of the political positions of many of the bands, I recognized the power of influence a person with a mic in hand could have.
Over the years I drifted more to the right on the American political spectrum. I am pro-life, I haven't always been. I am anti-death penalty, I haven't always been. I believe in marriage equality while at the same time respecting the tenets of my Catholic faith. These are three hot button issues that cause a lot of good people to have strong and divisive disagreement.
Our goal, if you can call it that, is to provide a forum to examine these issues in a different format. Throw out the Ivy league and Journalism school formulas. Let's get real. Let's disagree. But let's do it in a civil and constructive way. That is what I am striving for.
JJ
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