It will come as no surprise to readers here that I am a Democrat. (I know! You are shocked! I have said nothing, NOTHING about how awful I think the current administration is and how huge an Obama supporter I am! OBAMA 08!)
Eh-hem.
A better question is how I managed to become a Democrat. Or, more properly phrased, why I have never ever been a Republican. Because I grew up with the Republicans, oh yes, I did. I was surrounded by them. In seventh grade, when Mr. DK had us do a mock vote (it was Clinton v. Bushie Sr. at the time), I was one of two people in our class of 32 who voted Democrat. Mr. DK cracked, "Bush wishes this was reality." (Good news! Bushie lost that year.)
We were expected to be good little Republicans. We were expected to be against abortion and welfare and to vote against them reflexively.
It never really worked for me. I think in the beginning I was a Democrat partly because one formative person in my life (who shall remain anonymous here) was a Democrat, and partly out of sheer obstinacy. ("You want me to be a Republican? Fine, I'll be a Democrat." - I always wanted to be rebellious but I was just too much of a rule-follower, so I had to do it in quieter ways.)
When I started really thinking about it later, I just could not accept the lines that Republicans fed me. For example, I could not believe that voting against abortion was more important than voting for foreign aid (something more than the 0.03% or whatever of the national budget we give now). Even given the assumption that life begins at conception, I could never accept, having grown up in Africa, that the life of a three-day old zygote was MORE important than the life of a child whose mother had to watch him starve to death in Africa, or the life of a child who was killed by a bomb paid for by my taxes. Equally important, I could accept, but I could not accept the focus on one at the expense of the other, and I could not accept that I was supposed to ignore one of them with my vote.
I also never could accept that welfare was a bad thing. I lived in the inner city, as close as AZO gets to inner city, anyway, and I just did not see that mythical "welfare mother" abusing the system. I saw desperate people who needed some help. If I have to choose between a government that uses my tax dollars to provide a safe environment for the children of single mothers without skills or a government that uses even more of my tax dollars (and a lot of money borrowed from China) to fight untenable wars in multiple countries, I am going to choose the government with a good social welfare system every time.
Later, I learned that it was all more complicated than I was told growing up. The rates of abortions are identical in countries with legal and illegal abortion. Abortion is not cheap or simple; women don't get abortions because they are a fun thing to do. Women get abortions because they feel like they have no other choice. Even if abortion is illegal in the US, they will continue to feel like they have no other choice. The rate of abortion in this country will not change. You know what will change if abortion is outlawed? The number of women who die while they are having abortions. Making abortion illegal will result in more death, not less. What actually does help in reducing the number of abortions is having more of a safety net for women in desperate situations. Like, oh, I don't know, welfare. Universal health care. Which is exactly what Democrats favor. This is why rates of abortion are lower under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. You want to save unborn babies? Vote for the candidate who will provide the best safety net to pregnant women who do not have money, help or health insurance.
As long as outlawing abortion is the only issue for so many voters, Republican politicians are free to do whatever they want on all the other issues. They are free to deregulate everything to the point that even the average consumer (let alone anyone vulnerable because of youth, age or poverty) is at the whim of very large, anonymous corporations concerned only with the bottom line. They are free to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and use the money to fund a horrific war based on false premises like, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." I'm really tired of knowing that my tax dollars kill people.
Republican politicians will never get rid of abortion, because then they will lose their core constituency. People will start thinking about other issues.
As I said a few weeks ago, I have a lot of respect for conservatives who have thought through their policies and remain convinced that deregulation and free trade will help the most people in the long term. I just happen to disagree. Deregulation, as we have seen, results in huge monopolies who will do anything for money. If we don't trust our government to do a better job with health care than the current huge monopolies who spend all their time trying not to give their customers the services they paid for, then we should be improving the government, not simply turning everything over to the big companies and giving them permission to screw people over even more completely in search of even more money than they already make. This is what accountability is all about.
The fact is that you will find very few Republican US Americans overseas. It just doesn't last once you start seeing the rest of the world as real people. The world is too complicated to vote only, reflexively on the issue of abortion. We are all too interconnected. The world, and this country, needs us to hold our leaders accountable for far more than their views on one single issue.
Now is the time to expect more from our government.
Eh-hem.
A better question is how I managed to become a Democrat. Or, more properly phrased, why I have never ever been a Republican. Because I grew up with the Republicans, oh yes, I did. I was surrounded by them. In seventh grade, when Mr. DK had us do a mock vote (it was Clinton v. Bushie Sr. at the time), I was one of two people in our class of 32 who voted Democrat. Mr. DK cracked, "Bush wishes this was reality." (Good news! Bushie lost that year.)
We were expected to be good little Republicans. We were expected to be against abortion and welfare and to vote against them reflexively.
It never really worked for me. I think in the beginning I was a Democrat partly because one formative person in my life (who shall remain anonymous here) was a Democrat, and partly out of sheer obstinacy. ("You want me to be a Republican? Fine, I'll be a Democrat." - I always wanted to be rebellious but I was just too much of a rule-follower, so I had to do it in quieter ways.)
When I started really thinking about it later, I just could not accept the lines that Republicans fed me. For example, I could not believe that voting against abortion was more important than voting for foreign aid (something more than the 0.03% or whatever of the national budget we give now). Even given the assumption that life begins at conception, I could never accept, having grown up in Africa, that the life of a three-day old zygote was MORE important than the life of a child whose mother had to watch him starve to death in Africa, or the life of a child who was killed by a bomb paid for by my taxes. Equally important, I could accept, but I could not accept the focus on one at the expense of the other, and I could not accept that I was supposed to ignore one of them with my vote.
I also never could accept that welfare was a bad thing. I lived in the inner city, as close as AZO gets to inner city, anyway, and I just did not see that mythical "welfare mother" abusing the system. I saw desperate people who needed some help. If I have to choose between a government that uses my tax dollars to provide a safe environment for the children of single mothers without skills or a government that uses even more of my tax dollars (and a lot of money borrowed from China) to fight untenable wars in multiple countries, I am going to choose the government with a good social welfare system every time.
Later, I learned that it was all more complicated than I was told growing up. The rates of abortions are identical in countries with legal and illegal abortion. Abortion is not cheap or simple; women don't get abortions because they are a fun thing to do. Women get abortions because they feel like they have no other choice. Even if abortion is illegal in the US, they will continue to feel like they have no other choice. The rate of abortion in this country will not change. You know what will change if abortion is outlawed? The number of women who die while they are having abortions. Making abortion illegal will result in more death, not less. What actually does help in reducing the number of abortions is having more of a safety net for women in desperate situations. Like, oh, I don't know, welfare. Universal health care. Which is exactly what Democrats favor. This is why rates of abortion are lower under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. You want to save unborn babies? Vote for the candidate who will provide the best safety net to pregnant women who do not have money, help or health insurance.
As long as outlawing abortion is the only issue for so many voters, Republican politicians are free to do whatever they want on all the other issues. They are free to deregulate everything to the point that even the average consumer (let alone anyone vulnerable because of youth, age or poverty) is at the whim of very large, anonymous corporations concerned only with the bottom line. They are free to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and use the money to fund a horrific war based on false premises like, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." I'm really tired of knowing that my tax dollars kill people.
Republican politicians will never get rid of abortion, because then they will lose their core constituency. People will start thinking about other issues.
As I said a few weeks ago, I have a lot of respect for conservatives who have thought through their policies and remain convinced that deregulation and free trade will help the most people in the long term. I just happen to disagree. Deregulation, as we have seen, results in huge monopolies who will do anything for money. If we don't trust our government to do a better job with health care than the current huge monopolies who spend all their time trying not to give their customers the services they paid for, then we should be improving the government, not simply turning everything over to the big companies and giving them permission to screw people over even more completely in search of even more money than they already make. This is what accountability is all about.
The fact is that you will find very few Republican US Americans overseas. It just doesn't last once you start seeing the rest of the world as real people. The world is too complicated to vote only, reflexively on the issue of abortion. We are all too interconnected. The world, and this country, needs us to hold our leaders accountable for far more than their views on one single issue.
Now is the time to expect more from our government.
No comments:
Post a Comment