Change, Change, Change

I don't know if this generation tracks and notes sun signs with the same avidity they did when Linda Goodman reigned over astrology, but some might be unsurprised to learn I am an Aries. On April 14, I observed a fairly momentous anniversary of my birth.

It was nowhere near as momentous, or even as auspicious, as the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, but was for me of sufficient substance as to give me pause to take stock of my life so far.


More than a week past the event, my serious consultations with myself have led me to conclude that at this late date there is no time for the wobblies.

Since I am now only testy, where I was once thought tasty, and  I am wild when I once was mild, and I am fearless when I was considered (by some) to be peerless, I see no reason not to press on....regardless.

What gave me a little pressing push this morning was a most excellent catalog of the sins of the Republicans as published in the Washington Post by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein. The following may not be a live link but it should take you there.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html

Here is the part that cuts to the chase: "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, understanding and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

YES, indeed! They've got the bastards nailed to the utmost farthing!

What prompted me to blog after I read this story was a memory. 

I, a voluble and probably offensively insistent liberal, voted once  for George H. W. Bush and once for John Anderson. But things were different then, weren't they? I thought I was just voting against dopey Dukakis and stupid as a stick Reagan. I thought they were reasonable choices. Republicans then weren't identified as rabid, religion-crazy assholes.

Recently, I had occasion to look up John Anderson's biography. I really knew nothing about him in 1980 except that he was challenging two men I thought were weak. And the funny thing is, I learned that Anderson was an evangelical who, in his early years in the House, was hell bent on conforming Congress to fit his notion of a Christian body. Thankfully, his views altered considerably. And now, at 90, who remembers him?

But what was surprising to me was the fact that even if I knew he was an evangelical, it did not set off alarm bells. Religion was not then the dirty, narrow-minded, bigoted, insufferable state it is now.

One of the things I determined, as I did my recent inner consultation, was that I would spend the years left to me to work in the ways open to me to unseat the ignorant from any spheres of influence open to them.

I hope my friends will do the same.

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