Say Hi To My Mother For Me... Because I Can't Talk To Her

It is not uncommon for a guy to argue with his mother when he's growing up. This seems to be a rite of passage, the way of the world even. I have been arguing with mine for years now. When I was in middle school it was over the right to go out on Halloween night with some of the neighborhood, baggy-pants wearing riffraff, throw eggs and toilet paper at houses and spray shaving cream on smaller, unfortunate young'ns. When I was in high school it was over getting caught drinking in my basement, staying out past curfew or sneaking a girl into the house. When I was in college it was over mismanaging my money, overdrawing my account, and devoting too much time to fraternity life over studies. As I grew up, the issues about which we would argue became more adult in nature, the stakes got higher and the need for parental guidance greater. While I always had my guard up and defended even the most reprehensible actions, even then I knew when I was wrong and I knew when she was simply being a good mother. I don't need to look retrospectively at the situation to tell you I was a snotty kid who deserved to get yelled at. I knew I was but I couldn't help myself. I was wrong in probably every instance in which I fought my mom as a kid. Now I am, for all intents and purposes, an adult. I have made it, I can stand on my own two feet and I owe a lot of that to my mom. We no longer have to argue about all the childish bullshit I pulled as a kid. Yet, I find we have an entirely new topic about which to argue now and it is the last one I ever would've expected: Politics.

My father is a staunch democrat, always has been since the 1960's and he passed this sentiment on to his only son. I am by no means a bleeding heart liberal. I don't think the government should hand out welfare to idiots whose only accomplishment in life was figuring out how to fuck and make illegitimate children they can't afford, let alone raise. I don't think that every government dollar should go toward incentive programs and handouts for those who took no part in earning it. As a recent LA resident, I think illegal immigration has gotten out of control. I also think that to some extent, health care is a personal responsibility. However, I believe that America, as a democratic society, has some obligations to its citizens. It is not, in my opinion, anti-American to believe that those with the most means should contribute a little extra to help those less fortunate than themselves. Think of it as government mandated philanthropy.

Republican ideals, at this juncture in American history, seem to revolve around excessive government spending for highly unnecessary things for the average American taxpayer, most notably a military conflict (hard to call it a war without a legitimate enemy in uniform) in a barren wasteland with a fractious people. Yet John McCain, who believes we may need a significant presence in Iraq until I turn 124, is criticizing Barack Obama for being an excessive spender and a proponent of socialism. This is very funny to me and I will address why in more detail in a moment.

Republican ideals also seem to revolve around deregulation of any and all industries. The republican mantra has essentially been "Go with god." They didn't want to tax corporations, they didn't want to preclude them from shady practices, they didn't want to get involved at all. Just as long as Halliburton (21 million in losses for the 3rd quarter!) got that next big contract, Dick Cheney was happy. So lenders started lending to people who shouldn't have qualified for a loan for electronics equipment, leave alone a mortgage, at absurd loan-to-value ratios all because some financial whiz-kids on Wall Street created some abstruse financial instrument which got a computer to say "$500,000 mortgage with no money down for a low income family is a safe bet!" Wall Street shined shit and called it gold. Greed prevailed because everyone looked the other way. So now we have utterly obliterated credit markets, plummeting property values and consumers tighter than a virgin's honeypie. All this is creating the irrational fear that is causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to see if it can go as far below sea level as New Orleans' 9th Ward. These companies are not actually doing anything to lose value, investors just fear that it's all going to hell in a hand basket. We can thank the unregulated Credit Rating bureaus who initially approved all the bad loans for the big banks and then turned around and dropped their credit ratings more notches than Al Roker dropped on his belt size for this seemingly indomitable irrationality.

So now we have big spending on a failed military conflict with an, at the time conjured, but now very real enemy and a collapsed economy which has caused President Bush to do what he does best: instill fear! If we didn't get behind the bailout, he said, everything would crumble and we'd suffer an economic nuclear winter. I'm not questioning his judgment, just his approach. The bailout may very well have been absolutely necessary. But fear-mongering, as he did to muster support for the Iraq war, is such a pitiful way to get people's attention. Regardless of the necessity of the bailout and the way in which it was presented, it is a socialist policy and that is undeniable. Let's call a spade a spade. This administration, which was so careful for 8 years to privatize profit, has now made the public responsible for the debt. So, who's the socialist? If this is okay, why not a little socialism for health care? Why not a socialist work program to create green jobs and promote energy independence? Why fear that Barack Obama is going to do something that Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930's and the republicans of today are already doing? These are all questions which I have yet to get a legitimate answer for from my mother.

My mother is a Jewish woman, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She works for the New York City Board of Education and earns a teacher's salary. This is a demographic that I can assure you is largely democratic and, by largely, I mean 100%. Yet somehow I was birthed by the one conservative nutjob in the bunch. I am not one for throwing my mother under the bus. As Eminem so eloquently put it, "Now I would never dis my own mother just to get recognition," but this a circumstance that I just find very hard to swallow. She voted for George W. Bush in 2000. She voted for George W. Bush in 2004. And now she is primed and ready to vote for John McCain in 2008. Sometimes I wonder if the two of us have been living in the same country for the past 8 years, let alone how we are related by blood. My mother believed that George W. Bush has had her best interests at heart for the past 8 years and that John McCain does too. She has no idea what the republican party actually stands for. This has mainly to do with the fact that her only source of current information is Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. She ridicules and denounces the networks I watch including CNN, which is the most unbiased network of all, as being the "liberal mainstream media." She sounds like Sarah Palin which is another story altogether.

So each day, I get another e-mail from my mother about ACORN, or Bill Ayers, or Reverend Jeremiah Wright to now the latest development, the turncoat motherfucker from Philadelphia who is suing Barack Obama, claiming he is not a natural born American citizen. Everything my mother has ever brought to my attention as to why she is against Barack Obama has been to do with smear campaigns and pure conjecture about a shady past which have no relevance in choosing a person to lead the country. She is blinded by fear, and unconsciously (though she would never admit it) a latent racism that stems from a public school education in Brooklyn at a time when her neighborhood, Canarsie, rapidly turned from all white faces to virtually none is the blink of an eye.

I frankly do not care if every single rumor about Barack Obama is true so long as he possesses the wisdom and the demeanor to lead us out of crisis and make this country better. That is what an informed voter should base his/her vote on. To date, my mother hasn't given me a single reason as to why John McCain would make a better president than Barack Obama. All she can say is Barack Obama "cavorts with terrorists and traitors," "the terrorists around the world want him to win," "he's going to make this country a socialist republic," and "he's going to raise my taxes and redistribute the wealth to the poor." These are all the outcries of the ignorant and the severely misinformed. They are irrelevant arguments to me.

All I see is a confident middle aged man who can speak to the American people like no politician in recent history, who can keep his cool under pressure and who has intelligence far superior to the average man. When I look at John McCain, I see a severely weathered, bitter, old man, who has a fiery temperament, a penchant for anger, but most importantly a man who represents the party that is responsible for the majority of the problems this country now faces. I respect the fact that he served our country in war and feel badly that he was imprisoned unjustly, however I fail to see this as a qualification for president. There is no experience that can prepare anyone for the office of the president. What matters is the President's ability to adapt to situations, think rationally and compromise, all things I think Barack Obama will be better at, independent of all the other reasons why the republicans deserve to be ousted from power.

If the government does not fear the electorate, then democracy is broken. One party cannot fuck everything up for years on end and continue to be rewarded with reelection. That isn't how it's supposed to work. It would seem the reason it has worked recently is that there are some extremely evil geniuses out there such as Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch who are masters of spin and masters at getting low information voters, like my mother, to vote against their own economic interests time and time again. The republican party has done this mostly through the fabrication of social wedge issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. Dumb hicks in Alabama who cling to their hateful religion vote for a candidate nowadays because they'd rather see a guy in the White House who claims he's going to get Roe v. Wade overturned (never gunna happen) than a guy who is going to fight for the economic success of the middle class. Other uneducated, American voters who aren't necessarily so keen on the social wedge issues are being dissuaded from voting for Obama because of all the fear tactics. This is evidenced by the ignoramus who stood up at a McCain rally and said she couldn't trust Obama because he's an Arab. Others are chanting "Off with his head," and literally "Kill Him!" This is a country that no one should be proud to live in after comments like that.

To recap, in the past 8 years we have seen our country go to war with a country that had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11th. We have watched several thousand soldiers die needlessly in that godforsaken desert. We deposed a dictator who, while horrible, was a secular leader and the fear he instilled kept his people in line, preventing the chaos our army has now come to know. Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he merely wished to maintain the perception that he did so that Iran would not invade, something they will surely do now if we ever decide to leave Iraq. This means we essentially cannot leave unless we want to suffer the wrath of an evil juggernaut far worse than Iraq could ever have dreamed of being. We have not caught Osama Bin-Laden and let the war in Afghanistan fall by the wayside because, well, Afghanistan doesn't have anything we want and it's not in the region we wanted to spread democracy in so we don't care. We have done nothing to stop the genocide in Darfur for pretty much the same reason. We did nothing to save the people of New Orleans from the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina for a very similar reason. The No Child Left Behind policy is a bankrupt policy that, in effect, does leave children behind because it forces schools to lower standards to meet quota. We have virtually no science and math education and no one trying to take up a career in science research or engineering because getting into the Wall Street greed game has seemed a far more attractive career path to bright young men and women... until now. The economy has collapsed because there was no regulation or oversight imposed on any of the major banks, or financial institutions.

On every front, from the economy to education, from foreign policy to domestic, the republicans and the Bush administration have failed miserably. And the reason to give their party four more years to fuck it up even worse is??? I can think of really only a few and they are all ugly words: Fear, Racism, Bigotry, Ignorance, Stupidity. This means that my own mother, the woman who bore me, is operating based on one or more of these reasons and it makes me very, very sick. There is no reasoning with her. Obama is a socialist, he's a Black Panther, he's an elitist, he's this, he's that but god forbid he's a good candidate for president. God forbid a time may have finally come when this country can actually get over itself and its ugly past and elect an African-American man to be our President, not because he's African-American but because he's the most qualified candidate and the best choice for the betterment of our country.

Last I checked, the polls say Obama has a healthy lead and over 270 electoral votes through a combination of states either solidly in his corner or leaning his way. This is a breath of fresh air but it is by no means the endgame. I still have fear that people are saying they will do one thing to sound like a worldly citizen but when push comes to shove they will lend credence to their baser instincts. I guess I will get back to you about it on November 5th. In conclusion, I have learned to simply love my mother for all the good she has brought into my life and try to forget that she has absolutely no idea what she is talking about when it comes to politics and be thankful that she lives in New York where her vote won't count.