I used to be a Republican too
Sun Feb 27, 2005 at 08:12:05 AM PDT
I wrote a comment last night about this and was encouraged to write a diary on it, so I've rewritten and expanded upon it a bit. This is the story of my enlightenment, and how and why I came over to the other side.
As a child, my parents and my friends' parents taught us that all normal, sensible, and sane people were Republicans. The Democrats were all a bunch of irrational, crazy, fringe-element nuts with ridiculous extreme ideas that, were it not for the stable counterbalance of the Republicans in office, would rapidly send the whole economy down the tubes and turn the country into a socialist or even communist state.
We'd lose all our freedoms as well as the shirts off our backs, winding up in a government-subsidized nightmare of lazy people who never worked and were a huge drain on the few that remained in the job system, who would have to support not only their own families, but all the welfare queens as well. Those who worked hard should be entitled to keep every red cent.
They should not have to cough any of it up to help those lazy slobs who didn't have ambition or sense enough to find and stick with a long-term career with great benefits, including health insurance with dental and eye coverage, and an excellent retirement pension.
But the reality of the past couple decades of presidencies began to sink in, and I saw that though the Christians at the conservative church I'd been attending made a big stink about Clinton's "indiscretion" and the abortion issue, those things paled in comparison to the things that took place during Bush's first four years. I became concerned about how he was overturning so many environmental protections that former presidents had put in place--the air, the water, the forests, the parks--and his refusal to go along with the Kyoto Protocol.
I wondered why Bush suddenly didn't care anymore about Osama bin Laden and began targeting Iraq instead, and I saw the weird, shifty, kind of squirrely look he got in his eyes when he talked about it. I knew he was lying about the WMD by that look and his body language, and though I didn't believe the oil theory at that time, I wondered what was really going on. And I grew concerned at the ever-mounting number of deaths of both our servicemen and Iraqi civilians. I questioned fellow church members as to why their deaths mattered less than the unborn fetuses, and I was troubled rather than reassured by their responses that the deaths of the Iraqi civilians didn't matter because they were not Christians and were all a bunch of suicidal maniacal heathens that would kill us if they had half a chance. All those crazy Muslims should be wiped out from the face of the earth, several of them independently told me, because they don't believe in Jesus and are always causing wars and suicide-bombing people.
Up until this time, I had never cared much about politics and always thought the speeches and debates were boring, so I had never listened to them before previous elections. Plus I'd bought into the line of thinking that both parties were corrupt anyway, so it didn't really make all that much difference who was elected. But now I had become seriously concerned about President Bush and what he was up to. So I watched the debates between Bush and Kerry.
The first debate was the clincher for me. Bush's shifty looks and lying body language were overwhelming. Watching him alternately smirk and scowl, and his oiliness and obvious insincerity, made me nauseous, and I couldn't imagine what havoc he might wreak in another four years. I watched the other two debates as well, but I'd already made up my mind that we couldn't afford to have another term with Bush at the helm, and many of the things that I heard Kerry say there and on the campaign trail made so much more sense to me. And that amazed me, because I didn't expect Democrats to make sense. After all, they were supposed to be a bunch of crazy fringe nuts!
That's when I started to realize that maybe I wasn't really a Republican after all. I thought about each issue and how I really felt about it. And as I listened to the candidates for the various offices, I realized that about 80 percent of my own personal beliefs were being echoed by Kerry and the other Democrats, and less than 20 percent by Bush and the other Republicans. (Some of my beliefs neither of them espoused.)
After my shock and horror and extreme disappointment at the election results, I turned to the Democratic websites for solace and kindred spirits, and that was when I stumbled upon Daily Kos. And the more I read in the diaries here, the more I realize that I've really been a Democrat all along. I just didn't know it, because I didn't really understand what the Democrats and Republicans really stood for. I'd believed the stereotypes that were told to us by our parents and neighbors and pastors and people at church.
And I've learned during this presidency that it does make a huge difference which party is in office. And I'm concerned that the country that America has always been during my entire lifetime is going to be destroyed, because the Bush administration has already made earth-shaking changes, and there are not enough Democrats in power to stop them. Bush and his cronies have already taken things in such an extreme far-right direction and are still pushing to take them so much further.
That's why I'm reading and posting and getting involved here as one of the Kossacks every day now. I think a grassroots movement is the only way we can save this country as we know it. Not only that, but we can make it an even better place. Clean air, drinkable water, safe food, healthy people, jobs with a livable salary followed by a secure retirement, educated and loved children, healthcare, beautiful oases of preserved nature--who believes in and supports those things? We do!
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