Moments Worth Preserving

By Badphairy


I want to bronze this moment. My brother (the second eldest) is gloating about Hillary’s primary loss in “the whitest state in America” (Iowa). This is de rigeur in my family. However, I’m hearing “Go BarackO” in my ear. From my brother. The Marine. The lifelong Republican voter. He’s “voting for change” as I peel my jaw off the floor.

I’m not really sure how to take this. I’m not sure who I’m voting for, but I never thought I’d be discussing an election like this in my lifetime.

By the way, I am vaguely sickened by the way the media keeps portraying this as “the woman vs. the black” as if there is nothing to them but their labels. On this particular day, should we not be assessing candidates by the contents of their characters, not the color of their skin or the presence (or absence) of meat curtains?

Back to my brother, I’m just feeling weirded out by his support for Obama. It’s not as though I haven’t spent years attempting to convince the male members of my family that voting Republican didn’t necessarily float all boats equally. I got the standard WASP reply, i.e. ”I don’t actually care about other people’s boats. I care about my boat. Now STFU and scrub my floor”.

We did go on to scream at each other until we agreed that HillDawg can’t be BarackO’s Veep because it would lose him the support of cross-voting conservatives. He assured me there are some. I’d like pictures, names, and addresses, please.

I was interested primarily because I’ve rarely been able to have conversations like this in my family. Most of my family can’t or won’t “discuss.” They just scream loudest about how great the Republicans are and then retreat into pissy butthurtitude. In fact, I told one of them the housing bubble wouldn’t last and to prepare for the coming downturn, three years ago.

Not only didn’t he listen, I’m sure that now he would conveniently have no memory of said conversation. After all, what do Democrat commies understand about economics? I never thought my brother would be any different. Yet, here I am honestly inquiring what it is about BarackO that fires him up so.

I never really got an answer in that conversation. But he called me back. He said Americans are so complacent about their privileges that it sickened him. He’s seen fourteen year old girls in Asia selling themselves to his buddies to put rice on the family table, while we get all freaked out that our fourteen year olds aren’t doing enough extra credit to impress the Princeton Admissions Dept.

I may not agree with him about everything, but it’s damned hard to disagree with that. Maybe it’s time to put someone in power who understands that.