My first vote ever in a national election was for
Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s platform
was that less government was better. I had been a very independent teenager and
remained, though in the United States Marine Corps at the time, a very
independent young man. I saw no need for
the government to go messing in my life or anyone else’s. A lot of that is still with me.
About 30 years later one of my sons and I helped get
Ross Perot on the Minnesota ballot by getting signatures on a petition. We worked the front of the local grocery store. Perot’s platform was about what he called “the
crazy aunt in the basement.” The crazy
aunt that no one talked about was the budget deficit and the national
debt. Ross promised to eliminate both of
them.
Somewhere between those two, Matt and I went to see
Jesse Jackson during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. We stood by the entrance door and got to
shake his hand as he came into the auditorium.
We even went to the local Democratic caucus to try to get him on the
ballot.
Jesse, of course is as far from Barry and Ross, ideologically,
as you can get, but I wasn’t into ideology as much as I was into fairness. It was time for a Black person to make an
entrance onto the national political scene.
Since then I have tried to reconcile what I see as
good about the Republican Party with what I see as good about the
Democrats. My grandmother, “Nina” (nih
nah) was a dyed in the wool Democrat.
She had family pictures in her little government owned apartment, but
the biggest and most prominent photos were of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
John F Kennedy. A non-attending, but
contributing, Methodist, her heart was with the poor. In all-white government housing in the 1950s
her house was a regular stop for the Black mail carrier for a glass of ice
water at her kitchen table. And the
fatherless children knew they could find an open ear at her house.
Today I have problems with both parties. My beef with the Democrats is their adamant
support for killing off unborn babies.
That’s the same reason I cut off support for the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). Republicans, on the other hand exude meanness
toward the poor, toward strangers, and by extension at least toward people of
color.
Neither can I reconcile calling myself an
independent because there is a capitol “I” Independent party that picks up the deal
breaker positions from one or both of the other two parties.
So here I sit, with another national election warming
up, and no suitable party to turn to. Do
we have to start our own?
