December 11, 2004 Saturday 12:48pm
Dad came over with fudge that my mother made. Of course, we went to the basement to smoke and chat.
My father voted for Kerry for president. I had assumed that, though I knew his stances on gay-marraige and abortion, we’d find some common ground. I plumbed the depths to no avail.
To find something that we might agree on, I showed him my blog-site; he’d heard of blogs but had never seen one.
He didn’t agree with anything I had to say, yet he voted for Kerry. At one point, while discussing the fact that I am against abortion, but do not wish them to be banned, he went off on how horrendous partial-birth abortion is, and how he heard that the new agenda of pro-abortionists is to give new mothers ten days after a child is born, to decide whether or not they wish to keep the child or abort it.
What?
I’m going to have to look this up and see if there is some reference to it outside the right wing christian media that he watches on t.v. and hears on the radio.
************
I plugged in to Google the phrase, ‘abortion ten days after birth’ and came up with nothing. Then subtracted various words still coming up with nothing.
What my father must’ve heard was someone’s speculation that the abortion agenda might be looking to such things in the future. So, the truth of the matter is that such a statement is hokum.
Yet he voted for Kerry.
I am not for abortions. I would talk anyone out of it, unless they had damn good reasons for doing it, such as rape or incest or some horrendous birth defect, as long as it was in the first trimester of the pregnancy. I couldn’t bring myself to agree with anyone getting an abortion after the first trimester.
My father even agreed with my view of talking people out of abortions unless they had damn good reasons. Yet, he still thinks they should be banned. He went so far as to describe to me the procedure of partial-birth abortion, which I already knew.
The issue of abortion freaks him out on such a deep level that a rational conversation with him on this issue was impossible.
So why did he vote for Kerry? Taxes. He thinks Bush Jr. is giving big corporations too many tax breaks.
I asked him about the war in Iraq, and he said he agreed with our being there, that muslims were insane, and that they should be shown who’s the boss.
What?
I am amazed at how Americans think. We here in America, frequently referring to our country as “The Land Of The Free” talk about how we should be controlling the destiny of other countries, just because they don’t believe the way we do. Americans believe it OK for our children to fight and die just to bring them around to our way of thinking.
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Before our conversation devolved on the issue of abortion, and the war in Iraq, we discussed the issue of Americans immigrating to Canada. He had heard that ‘some web-site’ was getting 65,000 hits a day, with people looking to emigrate. Of course, from his point of view, it was all people who were tired of Bush Jr. passing out tax cuts to big corporations.
I told him, if a draft was ever brought back, I might be one of those who looks into immigrating to another country.
Being patriotic to this flawed nation of ours, he told me about his experience in other countries while in the Navy, and his conclusion was that we live in the freest nation on earth.
He might be right, but for how much longer?
***********
I had heard on the news that Dick Cheney is talking about not paying dues to the U.N. again. remember the last time that happened, back in 2001? Then came the disaster on 9-11-01, and within the week our U.N. dues were paid in full.
We cannot keep going down this road and expect the rest of the world to react kindly to us. We are forging ahead in an hostile environment, one in which our only strong ally, Tony Blair, (prime minister of England) is beginning to turn against us, saying that America should give the Kyoto protocols another look.
What worries me more than what we look like to the world is what we look like to ourselves. We are so fractured on these issues which shouldn’t even be issues, that we can’t unite on anything. My father, who voted for Kerry, as did I, doesn’t agree with me on anything, except that Bush Jr. and his minions are killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
The next tactic of the terrorists should be to propogate the divide between the “two Americas” because a nation divided would be easy to conquer. If Americans began a bloody civil war, we would be easy pickings for a nation of any size who wanted to walk in and mop things up.
But please, if you are one of those Americans that believes in banning things, or forcing others to do things ‘our way’, do me the favor of never again using the term, “The Land Of The Free” because it makes you a goddam liar.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
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