So I got to thinking about everything that I've felt about politics for the last couple of years and everything ugly that we've all seen, and I've started to realize something about myself. I've started to realize that I'm different than the folks who I disagree with, in very fundamental ways. There's a big part of me that felt for a very long time that it was just my natural predeliction to dislike the right, having been raised in a deep blue immigrant family. I thought, 'those other people are probably just like me, but see it from a different lens', and assumed that they wanted to end the ugliness along with me. Today I realized that I'm different from those people, and I never,
ever, want to be the same.
I got to thinking about something I heard someone on the right say about how we're just reacting to Bush this way because we didn't like the way the right reacted to Clinton's "loose morals", and that it's pure vindictiveness, and to be quite honest I used to believe that, or at least feel in my heart that maybe I was predisposed towards disliking a not-so-bad fella like GW. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that everything they said about Clinton and the things they disliked, the things that got them
heated up about Clinton, were always personal. There was disagreement about policy, there was dissatisfaction with issues, but at the heart of it they genuinely believed Bill Clinton was evil and they would be wrong to not expose it. They said that Clinton was a cocaine dealer who killed people as Governor of Arkansas and that he was a serial rapist. But I realized today that everything that I despise about Bush started after he was elected. Everything I dislike about him has nothing to do with his personality or his upbringing or anything about his personal life whatsoever. Everything I dislike about him has to do with what he has
done as President.
I know this isn't exactly a brilliant revelation, but I feel different today. I feel like I know better now, that I won't get sucked into feeling guilty about feeling so damned angry. It's not unreasonable. It's not unjustified. And I'm truly done and through with letting these people run my country.