Sunday, September 15, 2019

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows


I used to have a button (sadly, lost long ago, AFAIK) declaring I was a "yellow dog Democrat."  It had a yellow dog on it, and hearkened back to the Southern enthusiasm for Democrats back in the days before the Civil Rights Movement:  "I'd vote for a yellow dog if he was on the Democratic ticket."

I got my button sometime in the '70's, just to be clear.

Now Republicans are turning into yellow dogs?  Makes me feel like the "progressives" who aren't "enthusiastic" enough to vote are kind of like anti-vaxxers who don't remember epidemics of measles and whooping cough and mumps, or know anyone at all who had polio.  Easy to be glib about the future when you are so ignorant of the past.   Or to pout about politics because your candidate doesn't win and get to rule the world.  Allow me a long digression about being a liberal in Texas for a lifetime.

No, never mind.  I'm not your connection to history.

That is something, actually, Christianity used to do: connect you to the past.  Yes, it too soon became hide-bound and bound-up with whatever culture you grew up in and associated with "God's will," (so the pastor of the church in Sutherland Springs who lost his daughter that day, thinks God wants him to fun for public office to protect our God-given right to keep and bear arms of war), but it did give you a sense of history that we have now stripped away, and we are reaping that whirlwind.

Well, to a degree.  Actually anti-vaxxers fight well above their weight class, and they're losing in even liberal bastions like California (other states are going to follow suit eventually, and tighten up what they loosened).  There are worse problems connected to our lack of a sense of history, for consideration in another post.  Still:

You gotta grow up enough to recognize you do some things because it's a civic duty, or a public obligation, or you just have to in order to help us save the Republic.  It ain't always about your feelings, snowflake.

We voted for yellow dogs just to keep the Republicans at bay.  In Texas the ones we got regardless were George H.W. Bush and John Tower and eventually Phil Gramm, and then Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert.  If that's not reason enough to turn out and vote, I don't know what is.

No comments:

Post a Comment