Liberality

I mentioned in my last entry that I embraced liberal politics when I was in high school. I still do...but it has been an interesting journey. Actually got lost a couple of times, but I think I'm back on the right track now.

I grew up during the Vietnam War. The last draft lottery for the war was held for kids three years older than me. And it had been going on for more than a decade before that. Young guys, eighteen years old, inducted into the army and sent to hell in Vietnam. Many didn't come home. For a person my age, watching my contemporaries worry about being sent to fight a war half a world away for a cause they didn't believe in, there was no other way to BE besides liberal. Anti-war. Anti-murder.

Funny thing was, in the eighties, I became a born-again Christian. We were REALLY involved in a Pentecostal church. To the tune of having church-related activities going on five or six nights a week. Unfortunately, I had a HUGE problem with their politics. I remember being EXTREMELY troubled when our pastor, a former Catholic like myself, stood at the pulpit on a Sunday morning and told us all to go to the polls and "vote for the Ronald Reagan of our choice." I HATED Ronald Reagan. Always have, always will. But I never told anybody in our little Christian church. Looking back, I see how cowardly that was.

It was the Reagan years that sealed my bond to the Democratic party. The "trickle down" economics (I never got trickled down on, did you?) The wheeling and dealing, and never getting nailed for the illegal things he did. They called him "Teflon Ron..." And then, the conservative talk show thing started. The red-neck, "my way or the highway", holier-than-thou ***holes like Rush Limbaugh. I cringe for the American public, that jerks like Limbaugh have garnered such a following. Do you know, out here in Oregon, we have one of the greatest listenerships in the country for public radio? Because all they play on AM are conservative talk shows. Gag me with a spoon.

And so what can I say about GW Bush? That he scares the hell out of me? That he makes me so angry I can hardly see? That I can’t believe the American people have given a man who has the IQ of a garden slug the kind of adulation they have?  I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t care if the Democrats send Donald Duck up against him next November. Donald will get my vote.