Reply #26: My situation: [View All]

[callous taoboy]

My parents are both well-educated, upper middle class retired folks living in a basically all white country club retirement community. Their neighbor just had a letter published in the Austin Statesman which trotted out the tired old NeoCon tactic of labeling us "Anti-American, pro-Taliban eiltists." This sums up the "group think" happening in my folks' community (or as my friend calls it, "The Winners' Circle."). My step-mom lost a brother in Vietnam (causing their mother to become a terminal alcoholic), has another brother who is gay and has lived with the same partner for over 20 years: Needless to say, these times being what they are, she is very pro-war and anti gay marriage. She has Rush on the headphones as she cleans, Fox news on 24/7. She will quickly walk away from an argument when I call her on the BS, but we just don't talk politics any more. My dad was a hard-working mid-westerner who "votes his pocketbook." Period. Republican till the day he dies. I love him, but we haven't really discussed anything of substance since 2000. My brother, the trust-fund hippy, smoked too much bud and dropped too much orange sunshine back in the day to ever get him to actually vote republican, but he was known to scrawl on several bathroom walls in Austin prior to the start of the war: "Fuck Saddam- Bomb Baghdad." My other brother, pulling down well over 250 K per annum, will vote for bush again, but will vote for a Democrat for Congress because, as he states, "Kay Bailey Hutchison doesn't give a crap about the working man." He will vote for bush because he doesn't think changing presidents in the middle of a war a good idea and also because he likes bush. It's this brother whose politics drives me nuts-- he was an old, hair to his ass hippy back in the 70's but is now a yuppie living in dallas. He has been led politically astray by my dad (he's the favorite son, after all), and by big bucks. Yet he goes into a rage about the neighbors using so much pesticide on their lawns and finds every excuse he can to come see me in the country.