Family and Politics
My mother called me this morning, and she was pissed. She’d just gotten off the phone with one of my aunts in California, who voted for John McCain and Proposition 8 and is absolutely convinced that Barack Obama is going to destroy the budget and rack up the national debt and turn us into Soviet Russia. Oh, and by the way? Climate change doesn’t exist.
Nevermind the last balanced budget was under Bill Clinton’s administration, and the national debt first went out of control in the Reagan years.
My brother is an accountant, and he probably voted Republican too. My sister is apathetic and didn’t vote at all. My uncle, Dad’s brother, also voted Republican and has nothing but snide comments for people who work off the “taxpayer’s back” like my parents, who have spent their lives working for pennies in the public education system. It should be noted that Uncle Don works for a company that gets the majority of its income from government contracts.
(This isn’t the same, apparently. He’s performing a service. Unlike teachers, who are after all only educating future generations.)
Mom said to me this morning that my parents and I are probably the only liberals in the family, she didn’t understand what was wrong with people, and then we hung up. I had to do laundry.
I called her back 20 minutes later, after I arrived at the laundromat and put my laundry in to let her know that here, in a working class neighborhood in godless liberal New Jersey, we were watching Obama’s acceptance speech again.
It made her feel a little better.