Angels Who Have Forgotten Their Wings: Politics in America
I have a strong memory of my mother taking my sister and me to the polling booth. For weeks, my mother talked to us about who was on the ballot and why she was voting for them. When we got into the booth, my mother told us what to punch, and my sister and I took turns punching her selections.
My sister grew up to be the political one. She ended up sounding just like my mother in never-ending political debates at the dinner table. By contrast, I didn't know squat and couldn't care less... until 9/11.
I think a lot of people had a political awakening during the aftermath of 9/11. But most people clung to a specific political party's recitations to make sense of our suddenly uncertain surroundings. In my Democratic community of Ft. Lauderdale, I heard mostly anti-Bush statements, a desire for the US military to stop manipulating global politics, a call to end the Christian influence on political decisions which informed Bush's choice of the word "crusade," and a sinister, almost evil description of Republicans. I often heard these arguments come from my sister's mouth.
A little over five years ago I moved to Oxford, MS. The town differed from my Democratic community of Ft. Lauderdale in more ways than mere population and geography. I found myself in the buckle of a conservative Bible belt. The recited statements were now Republican ones. "Liberal" was now a dirty word. The name "Clinton" provoked irrational anger. The Democrats undermined the government's ability to keep this country safe. People trusted the Bush administration to have more information than the public and therefore to make decisions that the public couldn't justify or understand. And we lived in an inherently Christian country with invading foreigners who threatened us on the level of our nation's very foundations.
Prior to moving here I had met only one libertarian, but the free thinkers in this town (those who don't merely recite their party's platitudes) for the most part all tend to be libertarians. And yet, they hold onto principles even to the point of developing slippery-slope arguments and other logical fallacies. Although the libertarians excited me, I couldn't see one more party as a solution.
Everyday I'm searching for my political beliefs, and I don't think I'll ever find them. Some days I interpret through a socially liberal lens, and other days I make corrections to those interpretations with the help of a libertarian framework. Politically, I'm lost. That doesn't mean I accept or even reject some of the ideas that people throw at me. It just means I have problems understanding the people who sound like a tape recorder playing back what the pundits have fed them. I get angry at them--just like a liberal getting angry at a conservative, or a conservative getting angry at a liberal.
It's not okay for a voter to be political when the voter is merely churning out social programing. Just like my sister demonstrates at times, a lot of people repeat and vote the way they were raised to believe. That means they don't have a vote. They've become vessels for other people's votes, like a vast ideologue machine punching millions of yeses on proposition X and selections for candidate Y per recited-reasoning Z. That's not democracy. That's not social responsibility.
Those are angels who have forgotten their wings.
My sister grew up to be the political one. She ended up sounding just like my mother in never-ending political debates at the dinner table. By contrast, I didn't know squat and couldn't care less... until 9/11.
I think a lot of people had a political awakening during the aftermath of 9/11. But most people clung to a specific political party's recitations to make sense of our suddenly uncertain surroundings. In my Democratic community of Ft. Lauderdale, I heard mostly anti-Bush statements, a desire for the US military to stop manipulating global politics, a call to end the Christian influence on political decisions which informed Bush's choice of the word "crusade," and a sinister, almost evil description of Republicans. I often heard these arguments come from my sister's mouth.
A little over five years ago I moved to Oxford, MS. The town differed from my Democratic community of Ft. Lauderdale in more ways than mere population and geography. I found myself in the buckle of a conservative Bible belt. The recited statements were now Republican ones. "Liberal" was now a dirty word. The name "Clinton" provoked irrational anger. The Democrats undermined the government's ability to keep this country safe. People trusted the Bush administration to have more information than the public and therefore to make decisions that the public couldn't justify or understand. And we lived in an inherently Christian country with invading foreigners who threatened us on the level of our nation's very foundations.
Prior to moving here I had met only one libertarian, but the free thinkers in this town (those who don't merely recite their party's platitudes) for the most part all tend to be libertarians. And yet, they hold onto principles even to the point of developing slippery-slope arguments and other logical fallacies. Although the libertarians excited me, I couldn't see one more party as a solution.
Everyday I'm searching for my political beliefs, and I don't think I'll ever find them. Some days I interpret through a socially liberal lens, and other days I make corrections to those interpretations with the help of a libertarian framework. Politically, I'm lost. That doesn't mean I accept or even reject some of the ideas that people throw at me. It just means I have problems understanding the people who sound like a tape recorder playing back what the pundits have fed them. I get angry at them--just like a liberal getting angry at a conservative, or a conservative getting angry at a liberal.
It's not okay for a voter to be political when the voter is merely churning out social programing. Just like my sister demonstrates at times, a lot of people repeat and vote the way they were raised to believe. That means they don't have a vote. They've become vessels for other people's votes, like a vast ideologue machine punching millions of yeses on proposition X and selections for candidate Y per recited-reasoning Z. That's not democracy. That's not social responsibility.
Those are angels who have forgotten their wings.
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