"I'm Doing Just Fine With This Plank In My Eye"
The Democratic National Convention ended last week, and each night I watched as over-groomed adults and their weird offspring paraded around for several days, regaling the oddly rapt crowd with boring personal anecdotes or poorly delivered speeches. The talks from the former Democratic candidates were the worst, each one giving us a healthy reminder how lucky we are the party isn't nominating the makes-Gore-look-peppy Gen. Wesley Clark or the Ferengi-spawned Dennis Kucinich or the hostile hairdo that is Al Sharpton.
I'm not a staunch Democrat. At 22 years old, I'm not much of a staunch anything except an unemployed drain on my parents. But I liked the speech Kerry gave on the convention's final night, despite its corny nature: in his opening statement Kerry announced he was "reporting for duty" as he saluted the crowd, a move they loved but reminded me of every lie an adult's ever told me and mine, of which there have been many.
Behind the staged flourishes, though, were things I liked hearing: the U.S. will only go to war if it has to, not wants to; more money for education; increasing the minimum wage; the promise of other programs that sound appealing to me, a young man raised in a church supposedly geared toward caring for "widows and orphans."
That's why I'm currently supporting Kerry. His delivery and presence, coupled with the encouraging things he said, genuinely affected me. Do I believe President Bush is an evil warmonger, painted by the left to be destroying the world? No. Do I think he lied about Iraq, among other things? Yes, I do.
Being raised in that widows-and-orphans church gave me a supreme love for the First Amendment that allowed my family to practice our faith openly, and that same amendment also lets Bush's supporters continue to freely support him.
But I want a reason.
"He's a good man." So what? My father's a good man, but he couldn't lead the nation. "He appeals to the honest working class of middle America." I don't want someone who's going to dumb himself down (or, more frighteningly, naturally play it dumb) just to sound more folksy. "He's a Christian." So what? I've known plenty of misguided and genuinely awful Christians.
No longer will I stay silent when someone I know arbitrarily praises the president without supporting their admiration with a reason. I'm tired of letting the rabid and deluded members of my generation, the one that has the potential to actually be the greatest, claim that they've found the enlightened path to good government and I must be some kind of heathen (or worse, liberal) for not voting with my congregation.
You determined to keep your state red? Fine by me and the Founders. But you'd better be able to tell me why. Otherwise, you're no better than the names you call me.
"I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side." -- Sen. Kerry in his speech on the convention's final night
