I Finally Get It

Because I think this election is SO important, and because I am still on the voting fence, I gagged and tied myself up and forced me to watch most of both conventions.... with a little help from my DVR.

I've written about it so much it's completely redundant to say again, but here it is: I've never voted Republican before and many, although not all, of the planks of the Democratic platform resonate with my own values and those of my family background...

...BUT...

I've also been exposed to first-hand (not massaged by the mainstream media) Republican philosophy for the last few years. This exposure has been through lively discussion with a conservative friend whose intelligence and judgment I profoundly respect, and also by following a few well-researched, respectable and well-written conservative columns and blogs.

It's a fact, folks... all Republicans are not nutjobs, and valid, reasonable conservative viewpoints DO exist. There really are two sides to every issue, and both sides have merit if one is not deeply entrenched in partisan thinking.

I think I'm as objective about the two parties and their issues as anyone can be in this very partisan year. I'm also still very much in the "undecided" column about my November vote.

After all the balloons, confetti, placards, posters, banners, bullshit and empty words have been swept out of Denver & St. Paul, I'm left with a few confessions, impressions and conclusions.

This last Thursday night, at the close of Senator McCain's acceptance speech, was the first time in my memory that I have felt at all patriotic. (I've written about this weird deficit in my character previously, HERE.) I may have felt a twinge of something at JFK's funeral, another twinge at the first moon landing, spasms at the Challenger and WTC disasters... but had I owned a flag, I would have been waving it Thursday night.

With my girlie, estrogen-driven DNA, I have found every war (after WWII) incomprehensible and intrinsically barbaric and primitive, and so I've avoided almost all exposure to the many military actions of my lifetime. I despise the very nature of war and abhor everything connected to it. It therefore has always been a puzzle to me why the status of "military hero" would almost automatically mark a presidential candidate as "desirable"... but Thursday night, I finally got it.

It's not that every "decorated war hero" necessarily has the qualities -- whatever they may be -- to become an effective and powerful President. The heroic acts themselves are not the qualifying factors -- but the character formed and strengthened by the adversity, suffering, sacrifice and dedication to the ideal and reality of serving one's country absolutely is.

It's a truth of life that struggle makes us strong. The happy plateaus of our life are surely more pleasant and do give us breathing space to enjoy a little peace of mind and heart; but, it's from the depths of calamity and tragedy that we grow, that our character develops, that we emerge as a more mature, more complete person. In my opinion, the more we overcome, the stronger we become -- and the converse is true, too, (which worries me about the many ways our culture chooses to be "comfortable" rather than accept hard choices and hard consequences -- but that's another blog.)

Does my Oprah-esque epiphany, my ah ha! moment, mean that I'm voting for McCain and company now? Nope, not necessarily -- but it did give me an insight, at gut level, into the kind of character he possesses and what went into the formation of that character. The contrast with his opponent is obvious and almost painful.

I'm still stuck with the depressing opinion that we have three lightweight candidates and one man who may be too old to be effective. The parties' proposed solutions to our national concerns and issues seem to be more clearly defined this election, though, which may weigh heavier in my own decision than in previous years. Wouldn't it be peachy if the candidates could bring themselves to just tell us the plain, simple, unpackaged truth.... oops, sorry, I slipped into fantasy there for a moment.

Oh, before I leave -- I've been sent three different "letters" about Sarah Palin from three different sources, plus I've seen a couple on a blog or two. In case you're sent one of those from the vast "forward email hell" -- check out this link before you draw any conclusions about their validity: Letters from Alaska.
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Tough Stuff

I've just slogged through a terrible biography of FDR, written by by Ted Morgan. The 742 pages had a zillion arcane details, divined private thoughts and assigned motives... and plenty of just plain bad writing. Some of the highlights of the book, however, were these quotes regarding Roosevelt's triumph over, in all but the physical sense, his affliction by polio and subsequent crippling.

Eleanor Roosevelt was once asked the question, "Do you think your husband's illness has affected his mentality?" She said, "...yes. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind." Morgan goes on to say that Eleanor felt his years of convalescence had taught him patience.

Francis Perkins, the first woman to serve in the Cabinet, was appointed by FDR as Secretary of Labor in 1932 and served in that post until 1947. She is quoted as saying, "I would like to think that he would have done the things he did even without his paralysis, but knowing the streak of vanity and insincerity that there was in him, I don't think he would have unless somebody had dealt him a blow between the eyes..."

Steve Early, who went from AP reporter to FDR's White House secretary in charge of press relations (later serving as Deputy then Under Secretary of Defense) remarked, "If it hadn't been for his affliction, he never would have been President of the United States. In those earlier years, he was just a playboy...During his long illness, he began to read deeply and study public questions."

Adore or despise him, one can't discount the positive impact that FDR had on this country reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, and the impact he had on the world battling the evils of the war years. Life today would be immeasurably different had FDR not been our President from 1932 to 1945. FDR himself was immeasurably different because of his struggle with his disease and its effects.

The principle that adversity builds character, that we grow only through times of challenge and suffering, never through periods of ease and "being comfortable," is a basic truth of the human condition, yet it seems that in today's culture there's almost a conspiracy to ignore this fact, or at least a wish to deny it.

It makes me wonder and worry about our general trend to make and keep our lives, and our kids' lives, as bland as flan. Of course we don't want to suffer and certainly hope to keep our kids from ever suffering, but we also seem to shield our families from half of the choices life offers with both hands...in one, the fun, the easy, the pleasant; in the other, the good/bad news of character growth and strengthening.

I'm a relatively involved grandma, participating in many of the little kids' school, sports and art activities. While I certainly can't generalize about ALL kids, I have drawn some conclusions about the kids of middle class California yuppies.

In this group health care isn't a concern, family incomes allow nannys, McMansions and McBMW's. Peer pressure includes whose mom can come up with the most elaborate birthday party (the details would make you gag,) and the cutest designer clothes, and it's not unusual to send the family pet to doggy camp for the day.

The children I'm around are being reared with solid moral values, and most of these families are stable. That isn't my worry.

I've never seen a generation of kids who are so coddled, so protected, so babied (and so spoiled) -- if any of them ever reach any kind of independence, I'll be astonished. We read a lot about families who still shelter and support young adults long after college graduation as they have yet to make any kind of solid career move and just don't seem to mature as have previous generations -- and those kids are 15 years older than the children I see. I can't imagine what this next crop will be like.

I know there are safety issues involved today that I didn't have to deal with 25 years ago. I also know I was in a completely different economic class than these families (single mom, with a management position some years off,) but for the life of me, I can't see one of these little princes or princesses learning how to cook a real dinner at age nine, washing a dish with detergent and water, doing the family laundry at age ten or walking a mile or two to school daily. The hardest thing most of these kids face is a five-minute time out as discipline, the loss of a turtle, or an occasional difficult homework assignment. Wait...there are ready turtle replacements at Reptiles R Us and tutors standing by for the homework, and five minutes is...just five minutes.

In insulating these kids with money, with private schools, with 24-hour attention by overindulgent parents and nannies, with a lack of any real responsibility other than MAYBE tidying their professionally-decorated rooms, the kids are being denied one real opportunity for growth. They don't have to struggle for a damn thing now, nor will they in their rosy futures. I'll wager that they will be handed keys to their own baby BMW the day they get their driver's license and not one will ever work a day through high school or college.

All of these parents appear to know more about child-rearing than any expert on TV. What they seemed to have missed, however, is the truth that struggle, challenge, adversity and hardship really form the child's character. Everyone, sooner or later, gets their share of these. If they haven't had to deal with them in some minor form as kids, how will they survive their harsh lessons later? If they don't learn consequences and independence as kids... will they ever learn them as adults?

I hope I'm wrong about this. I hope that the security that comes from a solid financial foundation, that the parenting knowledge and values these kids are growing up with are enough to allow them to reach their potential as productive, independent adults. Coming from my own background, however, and seeing what strength of character a few years of hardship and necessity produced in my own sons, I have to wonder...and I worry.