Happy Veterans Day.
I come from a military family. I was a navy brat. My dad served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He’s buried in a veterans’ cemetery in the green rolling hills of Central Pennsylvania.
I never really knew his political affiliation. The closest he ever got to voting that I can remember was I think he might have voted for John Anderson. I think he might have been one of those people who didn’t want to take a side and would just serve the guy in charge at the time.
Who would have predicted that his kids would split with 2 of them embracing the Trumpish side and 1 of them being an FDR style liberal who likes a modified green new deal. Come to think of it, my dad eventually went to work at a nuclear power company after he retired from the navy and we never had air conditioning in our house. Nope. Waste of energy. We got a brutal lecture if we threw a single pair of jeans in the dryer. He insulated the windows every year with extra layers of plastic sheeting. Oh, yeah, he would have been all over the energy thing.
Anyway, the good news this Veterans Day is this:
The bad news is there are still 20% of Americans out there who don’t accept that Biden won.
I heard last night that the real reason Trumpers won’t accept the legitimacy of the mail in ballots is that they were not cast on Election Day. Noooo, we made it way too easy for voters to vote. The ballot comes to them, they filled it out at their leisure, they nonchalantly dropped it in the mail or casually walked it to a drop box, then they avoided the hassle of voting in person in a crowded church basement like all of the patriotic red blooded Americans on Election Day. And that’s just not right.
Mail in ballots take all the fun out of making people wait hours and hours in line, giving their precincts 2 poorly functioning voting machines, or closing their polling places and opening ONE Polling place miles away where there is no parking and voters have to cross a busy highway on foot to get to them. (I think Kansas is good at this). With mail in voting, a lot more undesirable Democrats will have the option of voting stress free. Well, in the future, it should be stress free. This year, it was still pretty stressful, what with Trump deliberately slowing down the mail and causing our nation’s veterans from getting all of their medications on time.
So really, it’s not that mail in ballots are unconstitutional. It’s that they are too convenient. It does make you wonder why Republicans were unwilling to take advantage of that convenience, especially in the middle of a raging pandemic. But then, they’d have to believe that the pandemic was real. They’d have to stop believing in conspiracy theories. They’d start to experience rational fear that they could get infected and die. They’d have to understand that maybe they will have to go into lockdown again because they refused to wear masks for most of the year, making the virus spread out of control and making it worse for the rest of us.
They don’t want to do that. They’d rather live in this bubble of make believe where Trump and rugged individualism is good and protecting your fellow citizens from infection and abiding by what your Democrat Governor is requiring is baaaaaad. Soooo baaaaad. He’s deliberately ruining your lives because why exactly?
I’ve had enough of the willfully ignorance and wishful thinking. My dad, the veteran, always told me, “wishing doesn’t make it so” and “sew buttons on balloons and get a bang out of life”.
So, weird pearls of wisdom, that was my dad. But I think he was right about wishing not making things so. You can’t make mail in ballots unconstitutional just because it makes voting too easy for people you’ve been trained to hate.
And he’d be seriously displeased by the recent turn of events in our family and the country. But he’d be delighted that I never put just a single pair of jeans in the dryer.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
I cannot argue that ‘veterans didn’t fight for you so you could be willfully ignorant’… but it kills me when I see ‘Veterans for Trump’ signs. I mean come on, he called those who fought Losers and Suckers.
Veterans are only human, so they can succumb to the drug that is bigotry, too.
They don’t believe he said it. Remember he also called John McCain a loser. Many had no problem with that.
Happy Veterans’ Day!
My father was in the Army Air Corps in WWII, he flew supply planes through Asia and Africa for five years. He began as a Private and finished the war as a Captain. He said that if he had stayed in, he could probably have been a Colonel, but could not become a General, because he did not have a West Point degree. He finished his service, married my mother; they had been engaged through the end of the war; and raised a family, with the G.I. Bill helping him buy a house. He became a graphic designer; he and my mother were always liberal Democrats, FDR and Stevenson supporters. They always stayed that way, and we always discussed politics. After a losing election, my mother and I would discuss it all, and she was always encouraging, in that we had won this or that Senate or Gubernatorial race, or had someone good to root for as the next Democratic nominee.
i think about what they would have done with regard to Trump. My father volunteered in the fight against fascism, and my mother helped with USO events. They joined Democratic clubs in the safe and pleasant but conservative oriented small suburb where I grew up; and my mother was in PTA, and had to battle against those who somehow thought PTA was a Communist front, and fluoridated water was a sinister plot. To see anti-semitism rise under Trump and his cult, to see what has been done to the bulwarks of democracy, would have been very upsetting for them, but we would have discussed it, and tried to find some kind of hopeful side. They would have been happy about the results of this election, though I am sure that they would have felt like i have, that Hillary should have been the nominee instead of Obama, and changed the course of history.
Republicans only want to win, because that brings them power and money, and the ability to force everyone else to do what they want. Any arguments they ever make about voting, are, like everything else they say, just cover for the fact that making voting harder for middle-class and poor people, helps them win, it is central to their aims. If those people had not been allowed to vote by mail, Republican states would have forced them to stand in line for two days in the middle of a pandemic, hoping that they would never get to the front of the line, and would leave in despair. That’s the Republican way. Slow down the mail so that probably hundreds of thousands of votes were never received; that helped them keep the Senate. They get to vote, and we don’t, that is what they subsist on. That is not what we fought for, during the Revolution, the Civil War, and WWii. But their fake patriotism only celebrates the symbols of war, not the purpose and the moral. It is sad that so many people, even veterans, have gotten confused so that they think that the Republicans are the patriotic party, because they wave the flags, and orate about American values, even while they are subverting all of it.
I am perhaps the only person on the internet who cannot link to a song, but one which i might recommend for this day, is not an American song, but poignant and powerful. “Remembrance Day’ by B-Movie, from 1981.
If your song is on YouTube, just move the pointer up to the bar which contains the Web address and right-click. If “Copy” is available (black print) left-click “Copy”. If it’s unavailable (gray print) click “Select All”, go back to the bar, right-click again, and “Copy” should be available this time.
Then, open up a comment box here, move the pointer into the box, right-click to open the menu, and left-click “Paste”. Then, add whatever text you want to add, then fill in your e-mail and name, as usual, in the proper boxes.
Meanwhile, thanks for steering me to a New Wave song I did not know existed.
Thanks, IBW, I will see if i can manage that!
William, your father was a remarkable man, indeed. You were fortunate to have had such good parents.
I wonder as to how many people realise that Mr Trump RAN AWAY ?