Almost Over!!!

 

 

By this time next week, the election, thanks be to God, will be over!!  It is obvious to any reader where I stand on this election.  I know from my time in office that it took me some two years before I felt the least bit comfortable in what I was doing.  Further, as I’ve stated before, I followed someone who was basically incompetent, and as a result it took my legislative assistant and me all of that first two years to respond to all of the constituent concerns that he apparently didn’t know how to do.  And our county had only about a 270,000 population.  It is beyond my comprehension what President Obama had to deal with when he became the President.  Although I have hit on some of these same themes in my previous blogs, I am going to state, once again, why the thought of a President Mitt Romney actually terrifies me. 

The first, of course, is his position on what progressive Catholics refer to as the “pelvic issues”.  Abortion, contraception, and homosexuality to name the most prominent.  It has taken this country some time to understand that women are as perfectly capable of making decisions as men, and in some cases more so when it comes to their own health care.  Men tend to idealize pregnancy, making comments that pregnancy is not a disease.  It does not fit the classic definition of a disease, but it can be just as lethal to a woman and the fetus as a disease, regardless of what Joe Walsh thinks.  If Romney is elected we will go back to the way women were treated when I was a young person, and I don’t want my beloved grand and great-granddaughters to have to live that way. 

The second reason is that it is pretty obvious that these radical right wing Republicans want to reestablish a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) aristocracy.  Since I don’t fit in to the P, or Protestant, part of this, I really question why some conservative Catholic Bishops are encouraging their “flock” to vote for Romney.  The Bishops of course have lost track of the fact that their “flock” is no longer recognizing them as legitimate “shepherds”.  The radical right has forgotten that the 99% of us vote.  Or perhaps that is why the voting machines in Ohio have ties to businesses that Romney has ties with. 

The third reason is that the safety net for American citizens will be shredded.  One never knows when one will need this safety net, including health care.  We can assume that possibly when one is older, but I know plenty of younger people who need help now and then, and we need to have that hand-up there for them.  This is not creating a dependent society.  It is creating a society where we care for each other.  In my youth in Southern California I was imbued with the notion that one took care of oneself and one’s family, but if a neighbor, through no fault of his or her own needed help, we would be there.  And if for some reason the tables were turned, our neighbors would be there for us.  This attitude that we are only in this for ourselves is so far from the way Californians in the country side lived (city folks may have had a different attitude), that I find it really hard to comprehend. 

The fourth reason is that Romney will roll back as many of our newly attained civil rights as he possible can.  Affirmative action will go out the window.  There will be massive voter suppression among ethnic and/or poor neighborhoods.  Racism will no longer be a shame; it will be the norm, as it was in my youth.  Fortunately for me, my own parents were so prejudiced against blacks, browns, Jews and anyone who was not like “us”, they never talked about it.  I think they thought it came with the genes!  Consequently I grew up not learning to look down on anyone. 

But the final reason is the trend toward totalitarianism I perceive in the GOP.  I’m not going to say they are going fascist, or becoming Nazis.  But they are beginning to exhibit tendencies toward excessive authoritarianism.  Saber rattling in the form of building up our military; removing any feminine influence from the public sphere by removing any legal protections for women (refusing to expand the Violence Against Women Act, and the sure overturning of that Act if our government goes all GOP); the reestablishment of a WASP aristocracy; the emphasis on business, or corporations as the ultimate good, and that government is all bad.  Go ahead.  I’m sure you can name a few yourselves. 

As some wit said, “The GOP believes in bi-partisanship when the Democrats do what the GOP orders them to.”  Hardly the ideal democracy.