My Ideals Come from my Family

I'm Thomas Hardman, from Aspen Hill. It will help you to understand me and my ideals if you know more about my family.

I never married, and have no children. My ancestry is mostly German-American, of the "old school". We're not Amish but some of us arrived on the same boats at the same time in history, before the American Revolutionary War.

My father started his life on a Kansas farm, where his family suffered through both the Dust Bowl and the Depression. He fought in the Mediterranean and North African theater for the US Navy in an outfit called the "Beachjumpers". Their heroism and effectiveness in the Second World War is well known and something of a legend in the community of Naval historians. After his return to the US, he met and married my mother, an office worker mostly raised in Detroit but born near Lebanon PA of an old established family with roots that include a known fighter in the Revolution.

After they married, kids came along, I am the youngest.

My father worked for years at the Helium Refinery in Shiprock NM and I was born in San Juan County Hospital in Farmington, New Mexico, USA. My mother was working for the US Public Health Service. Shortly before I was born, my father was disabled by a heart attack, and when there arose an opportunity for my mother to transfer to a much better-paid job in Rockville, MD, the family relocated here. Over the years, as modernizing medicine improved my father's health, he found work with Montgomery County Public Schools as an audio-visual repair technician, a position from which he retired well.

My mother finished out her career with the Federal government as a high ranking manager at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she was instrumental in promoting the cause of gender equality and equal opportunities. She worked afterwards as a manager for a regional Church organization, traveling widely to help start new congregations all over the Mid-Atlantic region.

My sisters are both retired career government workers.

I attended Montgomery County Public schools from first to twelfth grade, graduating in June 1976 from Robert E Peary HS on Arctic Avenue in Aspen Hill. I have been here for almost my entire life.

My parents split many years ago, after I graduated, and my father is in his nineties, visited daily in his retirement home by his wife. He needs to be there due to his arthritis and heart condition.

My mother is almost as elderly, though much more healthy, thanks to modern medicine and good family heritage. We are old-school German-Americans and where medical needs don't demand it, we don't put our elders out to pasture in retirement communities, though of course they are certainly free to choose it. I am the primary caretaker of my elderly mother, who is very attached to her lovely house which she has scrupulously kept since 1963.

As a family of lifelong career civil servants, and with a long family history of distinguished military service, we are of course a family of modest means, and no debts whatsoever, who believe very strongly in putting and keeping money in the bank and in real-estate.

With two parents who grew up into young adults in the Depression, I have always been taught the benefits of frugality. I have further learned that "if you can't pay cash for it, you must learn to do without". That's a philosophy that will guide me, if elected, on the County Council.

When you borrow money from the bank, actually you're borrowing other people's money. When you don't repay your loans, actually, you are effectively stealing other people's money. That's pretty immoral, don't you think? Should Montgomery County be funding itself on borrowed money? I don't think so! Nor should it regard the taxpayer as a limitless resource who can be shaken down for more and more and more. No, the right thing to do is to tighten the belt, and find waste and inefficiency and trim the fat out of the budget.

Some of my fellow candidate declare that they have sworn to not increase taxes any more than the amount allowed by the Charter. I'll go farther... I'll do my best to not increase property taxes at all, and to see if there's not some way to eliminate wasteful spending or inefficient use of resources so as to try to lower the income taxes as well.

You see, my family background, and our way of life, and the years of experience growing up and living among successful career civil servants gives me deep understanding of how to make government work, how to find where it doesn't work, and how to fix what's broken. My family background and history also teaches me that you can do a lot with next to nothing, and you don't need to borrow money to dress pretentiously and show off your wealth in prideful displays of ostentation. I'm not Amish, but in my attitudes, I'm not far from it.

I don't need to point out that when you see some Amish farmer my age, you may think you see some simple farmer, some rube, some hick with weird ways and strange beliefs. But you are almost certainly actually looking at someone with a deep and abiding love of nature and the land, with a shrewd business sense, lots of land that he owns free and clear, and enough wisdom to thank his maker for all of his blessings, and an understanding that being a Plain Person has every bit much of dignity and worth as can be possessed by any of those who flaunt all of their "stuff" and actually are owned by their bank.

I'm not taking money from developers, I am not taking money from any special interests.

I'm running for County Council because government is what my family does... aside from returning mostly whole from battles where quite frankly we kick much butt. Google the name of Hardman sometime... the military is a tradition to this very day.

I understand frugality. I understand hunger. I understand that the way you keep food in the larder is not spending your income on frivolous things. If elected, I will bring my familial culture of honesty, diligence, savings, persistence to the job, along with a morality that demands that you give people what they've paid for, and deliver a product where the price is right.