rapid dissent: We've all got to do our part

My first memory, that earliest cloudy moment in time that I can remember with only a passing clarity, is of Jimmy Carter's first State of the Union Address. I can remember ambling over to the television and being told what it was I was seeing by my parents who promptly burned the instant into my mind forever by warning that if I pressed my chubby little hands up against the shiny new TV tube one more time it would surely explode and kill me instantly. Heh, you should hear what my mother tells her grandchildren. Comedy gold.

That dreamy time so long ago marked the beginning of my conscious attention to politics. I made my first bet on an election in second grade. I lost. Coming from a blue collar union family, it's no surprise that Mondale was the household favorite even against the Reagan machine. I hoped again for a Democratic ticket when I taped the Presidential debates a few years later on VHS. Even at 13 I knew damn well that the revolving door ads, Willy Horton, and the infamous "geek in a tank" photo had done Dukakis in.

As a teen, I wanted nothing more than to escape the construction laborer/waitress tax bracket my parents struggled in, and I let my fantasies infect my political leanings. My last act as a fledgling Democrat was to stand in line for Bill Clinton. I was by far the youngest person at the polls that year at a musty V.F.W. post in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I wasn't old enough to vote yet, but I wanted to see the polls for when I could. Dude, they had levers. Levers. WTF?

Then college happened. While everyone else was smoking up and finding their inner beret wearing leftist, I turned right. Hard right. I started out pretty far left with a mother whose paycheck depended on affirmative action, and a father who never missed a union meetting, so I never went off the Ayn Rand deep-end. Still I covered enough ground to sign up as a College Republican, and eventually joined the military
against my parents urgings.

I voted for George W. Bush.

Once.

I left the military a few months after September 11th, 2001. I saw first hand the utter chaos and dumbfuckery that got us into that mess in the first place. I also saw what we liked to call the "Great Leaders of Men" attempt to shove ten pounds of shit into a five-pound-bag and call it "intelligence." So, yeah. That was enough for me.

I've been a Democrat ever since, and I've never been prouder of my country in my adult life than I was when I saw throngs of Europeans waving American flags not in sympathy or protest, but in support of an idea and a hope of what could be.

As a student of politics and government for very nearly my entire life, I've seen a lot things and I've studied many more, but I've never, ever, seen, heard, nor read about anything like what we saw in Germany when Senator Barack Obama spoke. It was awesome.