I was chatting with my neighbor about this and that, when I asked her, "Are you registered to vote?"
She said, "Yeah."
Her grandson came over and said, "Who are we voting for, Gramma?"
She looked at me, looked down, and said, almost embarrassed, "I'm a Republican". (We have lawn signs...)
More below the cut....
I smiled and said, "That's okay. I want people to be involved and know the issues..."
She seemed a little uncomfortable, but not exactly unwilling to talk, so I said, "You know, I know a lot of people who are very staunchly Democratic, and I voted for Gore in the last election, but I didn't assume it would be the end of the world if Bush won. I thought, 'Well, let's see what he does....'
"His talk was not terrible--the platform he was running on, although not exactly my ideal, had a lot of "good ideas" in it. Then September 11th happened. And I though, 'Well, he'll either be great, or completely flop.'
"I started to get concerned when the Patriot Act passed. It seemed so alien, to have someone talking about "patriotism" while doing so much to circumvent the constitution. It's just not what I think about when I think of this country, having anyone who disagrees being called a "traitor". I think that people who disagree should be able to live next door to each other, not accuse each other of lack of patriotism just for disagreeing.
"So then the whole Iraq thing started to unfold, and although I knew a lot of people who were strongly against it, I held my judgment for more information. Because it was clear that yeah, Saddam was a creep and an evil guy, and potentially dangerous. So if he did have weapons of mass distruction, then yeah, going in would be a good thing. Getting rid of him, period, was not a bad thing, but without a specific threat to us, I couldn't imagine doing it with so little international cooperation.
"When it became obvious that there were no WMD, that was when I got pissed. Not just that he was wrong, but that it seemed there was a systemic effort to avoid any information contrary to what they wanted to hear. THAT is dangerous.
"My Grandma is a Republican, has been most of her life, and she's voting for Kerry this time. I think she feels like Bush betrayed the whole Republican party, not to mention the country, in working hard to mislead people all the time about what his real priorities are."
My neighbor said, "Yeah, there's a whole lot to think about before we vote. I do know I'm voting No on that measure 36 (the anti-gay marriage thing.)"
I said, "Yeah? putting that in the constitution didn't make much sense to me either. And I know too many lesbians to buy the idea that they're a "threat"... they have cats and kids and mortgages just like the rest of us, and they all swear the best way to guarantee having a straight kid is to give them gay parents. I mean look, all the lesbians' parents were straight, so THAT is no guarantee... And I can't get married in the Catholic church already, even though I'm straight, because I'm not Catholic. Nothing wrong with that, but if I can get married at city hall or the Unitarian Church, why can't my friends who have been together for decades and do more community work in one month than most people do in a lifetime get married there, too?"
Anyway--I have no idea if I "changed her mind", but she sure seemed uneasy with the whole voting for Bush thing.