The Dream
In my very odd dream, a large group of people was touring London. The group included Patrick and I (no Jack), Patrick’s sister Erin and her daughter (no husband), MY parents, the pastor of the church we attend here, and a handful of strangers. It involved various strange dream-moments, including Erin insisting that we buy a wall hand dryer for her friend’s bathroom as a souvenir (it had to be from LONDON), and all of us taking off our shoes to splash in puddles in the street. At the very end, someone in a tourist shop shouted Tea Party! Tea Party! and then handed our pastor (who was holding my niece at the time) an old fashioned black phone – one of those kinds with a separate earpiece that you hold to your ear. He listened a moment, got off the phone, consulted with my parents, and then it came out somehow that my parents wanted to take us all on a five hour cruise in the Thames with the American Tea Party movement. I refused, my mother stomped her foot, and I was so deeply annoyed with her that I woke up angry and had to blink and wrinkle my forehead a number of times before I fully understood that I was home in bed.
This Morning
So, I wonder a bit what that was about? I have no idea, but what it did is got me thinking about sending my kid to his grandparents’ house for a week, which is what we’re about to do (helps with exam week.) My parents have often joked, though not recently, that if they ever get Jack to themselves he’ll be watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh all day that they have him, so that he comes back to us a staunch Republican. They’re (mostly) kidding, and I know what lies underneath it is a disappointment that their eldest child (and only their eldest, as far as I know) is a turncoat lib Dem. I started thinking about that this morning, and wondering how I would feel if Jack grew up a Republican. It certainly doesn’t bother me in the slightest if he gets exposure to Republican ideals, though I wish it was the more elevated discourse of men-of-old like William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, or William Safire, instead of that harping entertainer Limbaugh and those of his ilk on Fox, whose sole purpose seems to be to demonize, divide, and thereby get ratings. But that’s different from him becoming a conservative Republican as an adult. How would I feel?
I came to this conclusion, and it’s one I stand by, even though this is years in the future. If Jack becomes a Republican conservative when he grows up, I will not mind. But I want him to be the type of Republican who talks about economic policy, about government size and spending, about taxes and how they affect the financial health of our nation. I want him to have an open, questioning, critical mind, and I want him to know he can argue with me and will get a good, non-emotional argument back (well, maybe he’d better argue with his dad, who’s better at talking about this sort of thing). I will be disappointed in myself if I raise a kid who talks about (the future analogies of) Obama’s birth certificate, the fact that he’s a Muslim, a socialist, a communist, as bad as Hitler, his wife’s a racist, his policies will destroy America. If he rants that abortion doctors should be murdered, that gays are disgusting and don’t belong in our society, and that poor (black) people in projects are a totally useless drain on our resources (without giving any kind of constructive argument on what to do with them all), I will be disappointed indeed.
I really don’t like what the Republican party stands for these days. I don’t like the xenophobia, the exclusive claims on patriotism and family values and love of God, the aligning of the religious right with the political right, the support of torture in the name of "freedom", and the suspicion of the highly educated in favor of "rogues" who barely finished college and don’t read or think or express ideas (even if she looks cute when she winks). I have a great deal of respect for the Republican ideals of small government, laissez faire economic policy, low taxes and trickle down economics, even if I don’t think some of that stuff works. I understand why they oppose public healthcare (though I would have hoped that this recession and the number of "hard-working", "deserving" people without jobs or healthcare due to those "lazy" "welfare queens" who "bought houses they couldn’t afford" [let’s not forget, with rich and greedy people’s help] and killed the economy would even soften my staunchly conservative parents’ hearts. Note, parents, that without health care reform, if Jack gets cancer right now and it costs more than $250,000 to fix [our lifetime cap], he will die. Pooling our family’s resources all together, we still couldn’t possibly come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars for his treatment. That is the truth, and I want it to bother you.) It distresses me that the faces and mouthpieces of the Republican party are not talking about ideas anymore. I don’t have any respect for most of them, and I don’t want to listen to any of them, because what they say seems to be all about injecting confusion and fear rather than challenging policies for the sake of America’s economic and social health.
It is conceivable that, in a differe political climate, I could vote Republican. I’m actually pretty fiscally conservative, though socially not so much. Before he listened to his lousy presidential campaign managers and let his campaign devolve into scaremongering and personal attacks on his opponent, I quite liked John McCain and would have considered voting for him. But the Republicans aren’t interested in moderates like me. To be a moderate Republican is to commit political suicide, and it’s because of loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck that this is so. And I wish it wasn’t. I would love to be convinced, swayed by reasonable discourse from the other side. I loathe being harangued and tricked and emotionally manipulated. I loathe it enough that I got up at 7am on a Saturday morning even though my kid was still sleeping, and poured this out onto a blog that 6 people read.
So, in fine . . . I am glad Jack is spending time with his grandparents, and I don’t mind if they talk to him about what it means to be a Republican. I would rather he didn’t hear Rush and Glenn and Ann and Greta and the rest of them, but it won’t kill him. God knows, it might kill me this Christmas break, as that’s usually all that’s on my parents’ t.v., but we’ll all survive. I have to trust that my parents will be reasonable, and they won’t tell him his parents are evil or don’t love America. (OK, I realize he’s one year old, but I’m talking now and in the future, right?) They won’t take him to a tea party rally, since they never go to those things themselves. They’ll keep him safe, and play with him, and make him feel loved, and maybe teach him a little about trickle down economics, and that’s F-I-N-E fine with me.
And now, speaking of the devil – he’s awake. End harangue.
Don\’t worry. His aunt cannot stand those shows/radio programs either, so I will rescue him!