Never speak about politics in mixed company. It's a sure way to piss someone off.
I'm a Republican. Not the dyed through and through kind. But a registered, actively voting, "go Republican" kind of guy. This week when Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter changed his affiliation to the Democratic party it touched off a firestorm on Capitol Hill and the debate on whether he's moving right to left to assure re-election.
As a child of the 60's and 70's those liberal teachings through school made it easy for me to lean left. Peer pressure didn't make the options easier. An 18 year old Republican either kept quiet or risked being tagged as a geek. You know that Microsoft guy in the current Apple TV commercials? If you were a young republican in 1974 that was YOU. Not cool.
In the 90's the Limbaughian Era opened my eyes to a new way of thinking, more often than not, reflecting my lifestyle and attitude. But Specter's jump stage left this week put a magnifying glass on the Republican party and conservative ideologue that when viewed close up began to scare the hell out of me.
While Democrats jumped head first into our current economic mess with full intentions of stopping the bleeding Republicans are still sitting on their hands. No, I don't mean they're working on a creative alternative fix. OK I'm a businessman but I've never seen business problems fix themselves. Was that the morning I had that bad hangover in college and missed that class of Econ 101? I don't think so.
As global warming becomes determined to give our children an entirely different world than the one we were raised in I watch the GOP denies, resists and fights change. Meanwhile Democratic leaders, despite Al Gore's best attempts to make it look like they have an environmental screw loose, lead the charge of legislative change basing their efforts on the scientific evidence at hand, the visual effects of environment ignorance, and the cry of all of us who have coughed from the smog and the winced at the sight of a polluted stream.
Our future is beginning to bite us in the butt as our longer life span leads to new diseases threatening our lives. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer. They devastate not only people and their families but the entire health care system and threaten our future economic balance (insert joke about current economy here). Scientists need the full arsenal of testing and research to find the cures and stem cell testing is one of those huge opportunities Republicans just can't grasp the idea of controlled research. Yup, that's my party. The party of "oh what they hell, old people are gonna die anyway..."
Am I missing something here?
Early on Arlen Specter was a Democrat. And like him today, this author and Sen. Specter are both looking for the way home. They'll call us flip-flopper's. But times change, life changes, people change. If being a political flip-flopper means following my values then I guess I'm in good company.
