It's been cloudy all day long, and we've had at least an inch more of rain, if not more. We experienced the worst drought on record in the early part of the year, and now we have more rain than we know what to do with. There is not much chance it will flood here at my house, but all the wetlands around here, and all the flood plains down toward the river that runs through our property, are flooded to the gill.
I read this article about why people vote Republican:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
I've always been curious. The article couldn't really have legs unless it also told why Democrats vote for the reasons they do. The author got a fellowship to study in India. His visit there changed his mind from being so liberal. The detachment he acquired from living in a completely different culture allowed him to view American culture in a way that hadn't been possible before. It made me think about how I was raised, and the effect of having the culture I was brought up to think of as the status quo was criminalized by law in my early twenties.
I've always been exceedingly curious about why life has evolved to be the way it is. In the past, I blamed my curiosity for the views I held about political life. Now, I'm not so sure. The fact that the culture I grew up in was condemned by law pretty much forced me to find other ways of looking at life. The legal aspects didn't give me much choice about the matter, my extreme curiosity not withstanding.
Like most of the people in the South around me, I was raised by parents who were Democrats. After the Civil Rights laws were passed in the early Sixties, many of the people who were registered as Democrats changed parties and registered as Republicans. The blacks were bloc voting Democrat, so I figured the former Democrats who changed parties did that because they were prejudiced. After reading this article, I have realized I might not have had the situation as figured out as I thought I did.
Basically the author is saying that happened more because of how the people who changed political parties did that for reasons of fear and insecurity than racial prejudice. That's not to say they weren't racists, but to say that their reasons weren't just about race or prejudice. It was about morals. Whatever the author's intent was in reaching his conclusions, the article made me feel selfish in some way. Like I may have gone over the top with my quest for individuality. But, it also made me feel like I didn't have as much of a choice as I thought I did because of what was going on around me during my formative years.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
