Grandma Is Full of Surprises
I visited my grandmother the weekend before last. There was a convention in her area and I thought I'd stay with her to get some one-on-one time. (As the one of 16 cousins on that side of my family, and being one of the long distance ones, I haven't gotten her to myself much in my life.)
The morining I arrived, she was running out the door to a bridge game, so I was on my own to settle in before heading out to my event. One thing I noticed in her condo was a copy of the National Review on her side table. It made me sad. "Note to self:" I thought, "Don't talk politics with Grandma."
Due to the hours of my convention, I didn't see her till the next morning. When I got up, she had the TV on in the living room, and she let me know that they'd caught the Olympic Park bomber. I was stunned. We sat down and watched some of the coverage on MSNBC for a while. Over breakfast, I hazarded the comment that my mom (her daughter) has said since the run-up to the Afghanistan war that we could never catch Osama bin Laden, since we couldn't even catch Eric Robert Rudolph. They'd been talking on the news that morning about how locals had been helping Rudolph, and Grandma noted that she didn't blame the Afghans for doing the same with bin Laden. All they know, she said, was that we bombed them. Why would they want to help foreign invaders who'd bombed their country, no matter what their intentions?
Well, she was just getting started. She volunteered to me that she didn't vote for Bush last time, and didn't plan to vote for him this time, either. Well go, Grandma! Then, she clarified that she'd voted for Nader! This floored me. I told her about seeing the copy of the National Review, and of my reaction to it. She pointed out that it was addressed to my late Grandpa. (I'd noticed this, but then she often mails letters under his name.) She went on that he used to subscribe to both liberal and conservative journals to get all sides of a story, and they would occasionally send some free issues to lure him back.
Now, Grandma is no aging radical. She spent most of her life married to my grandfather who was a commanding officer of a naval ship in WWII ("a popular war," as Grandma pointed out). She is the matriarch of a large Irish Catholic family (my branch is not Catholic, but the family is as a whole). She's got Grandpa's 48 star American flag and a painting of his ship on display. I don't think she's ever been to a protest in her life. Yet she felt unsatisfied enough with Gore as a candidate that she jumped ship to the Greens in 2000.
I tell this story for the following reason: we must not fight among ourselves over the 2000 election. To borrow a phrase from my mom, we must focus on what is the "next right thing" to do. That next right thing is to unite against Bush in 2004. If even my grandmother voted Nader in 2000, then surely Gore's loss was not solely the result of idealistic radicals. Blaming Greens for the current situation will not fix things today, and will not unite us for tomorrow.
11:09:54 AM 
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