If there was a lesson to be learned, the presidential election
of 2000 taught us that every single vote literally counts. Some cast votes were
counted incorrectly and some chads were pregnant, spawning an election where, several
days after the polls closed, we still didn’t know who our president was. It
proved to be a bad omen, and here we are, four years later, convincing friends
to vote in 2004.
There’s a saying, Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.
Here, in the Bay Area where, where
the majority of voters are liberal, we’re preaching to the converted. But what
about preaching furhter afield, what about family? What do you do then?
Like a dark secret, lately many of my liberal friends are
confessing that their families are staunch Republicans. I have never before
admitted in public that my enormous ecelctic, whacky family too is Republican
to the bone. As in Orange County Republican. We have more than our fair share
of laywers, judges, policement and doctors.
At family gatherings, politics are
always a hot subject. One of my earliest memories is of my grand uncles and
aunts pounding the table, whiskey jars jumping in unison like amber soldiers. But
you can’t divorce an entire family. I tried that for a few decades but it only
isolated me from my roots. I mourn those lost years of self imposed exile when many of my relatives
died.
There’s a popular anti-Republican joke set in the Midwest, where
a Republican teacher asks a class to raise their hands if they’re Republican. The
whole class raises their hands except a lone student, Mary, dissents. She claims
that she’s a Democrat by virtue of the fact that both her parents are Democrats.
You wouldn’t find me raising my hand in that classroom
either though I’m from a family where both my parents are Republicans. And
their parents were Republicans. And that’s about as far back as it goes. Most of us are newly arrived to this continent.
