Every time it is an adventure of personal rediscovery. I am a procrastinative packrat by nature with a conflicting obsessive-compulsive organization fetish. Thus every couple of years I find myself once again sitting on the carpet, where spread out about me are dozens of utility bills, insurance documents, and mutual fund prospectuses. It is time once again to do battle with the piles of paper, which I dutifully sort and file away in a steel four-drawer file cabinet, certain that any one of these documents might someday be my salvation from financial ruin. My only allies in this battle are a stapler, a label maker, and perhaps a good, strong
G&T.
Inevitably I unearth certain documents that pique my interest more than the typical 18-month-old bank statement. There are indeed gems within the piles that make the tedious process worthwhile. There is, for example, my treasured sample ballot for the
2003 California gubernatorial recall election, which I must save forever as a memento of the ridiculousness of a ballot listing 135 candidates. There is also a very old voter registration card proving that I was as recently as 1994 a nominal ...
Libertarian.
Wow. So what's up with that? This already had me thinking, when yesterday I happened to catch the last few minutes of Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio. Randi was alluding to a phenomenon that I often contemplate (much to my consternation): that voters often will cast ballots for an incumbent in spite of their misgivings, on the premise of "better the devil you know." Randi pointed out that congressional elections happen every two years and therefore it need not require a supreme act of courage to take a chance on a lesser-known challenger.
I have some thoughts on that, a flash of inspiration wrapped in deja vu, that inspire my first diary. Thoughts like, "Hey, that was me. I've still got the proof."
As a newly minted "adult" in 1985, my first civic obligation was a trip to the local post office to register with the Selective Service System. Even then, I fully understood the implications of military conscription and had a sense of how controversial the draft had been during my childhood. I knew that some Vietnam-era men had felt compelled to burn their draft cards, even to move to Canada. But the draft had ended in 1973, and this was just a formality so that I would be eligible for government financial aid to attend college. I held my nose and registered. But I also understood the connection between the draft and the 26th Amendment, and I registered to vote the very same day.
Ronald Reagan had just begun his second term, and it was with some disappointment that I realized it would be more than three years before I would finally be able to cast my first vote for President. The total extent of my political acumen consisted of a sense that Jimmy Carter couldn't do anything about our hostages in Iran, and that Reagan had scared the Iranians into giving us the hostages back. Down-ticket races were a distant afterthought. I registered as a Republican. I was a member of the winning team.
When 1988 rolled around, I was irritated by the Iran-Contra Affair with its interminable televised hearings, and disgusted by Reagan's rapidly failing memory. I was glad that The Gipper had finally run up against his term limit. Michael Dukakis did not inspire me, however, and I voted for George H. W. Bush out of a sense of continuity. I felt comfortable voting for the devil candidate that I thought I knew, particularly when his party matched the one on my voter registration card. It would be the first and the last time that I ever voted for a Republican.
Over the next few years, while I identified with the Republican lip service paid to the virtues of fiscal discipline, I became more and more uncomfortable with the growing influence of social conservatives within the party. Once again I found myself at the post office, and at a political crossroads. I follow a strict tradition, should I owe money to the IRS, of hand-delivering my tax return to a post office as late as possible on the evening of April 15. It makes for a certain camaraderie and I enjoy the occasional street theater. One particular April 15, just a couple years after I started making a real income and owing real taxes, a Libertarian pamphlet distributor got his hooks into me and I changed my party registration within a few days. Nevertheless, I was never entirely comfortable with the Libertarian platform. I generally like the idea of third (and fourth, and fifth) parties for the diversity they add to the national dialogue, but the Libertarian true believers are just so ... over the top. The following year, on April 15th, I told the pamphlet distributor at the post office that I was registered Libertarian, but that abolishing the federal income tax was an untenable goal. He gave me the the look of an evangelist who had finally met a soul beyond salvation.
Then came 1992, and here was a much younger, highly charismatic, saxophone-playing Democrat for President. It was scary. He wasn't of my party, and I didn't really know much about him. Mightn't he raise my taxes? He was challenging an incumbent, for crying out loud, the guy who liberated Kuwait! George H. W. Bush was no Jimmy Carter, and I'd voted for him before. Should I really send him home after just one term? But I was young(er), just starting a new career, and I saw the potential for a younger, hipper, more enlightened government. So I mustered a little bit of courage. With some trepidation, I pulled the lever for Bill Clinton, and hoped for the best. When the votes were counted, when red, white, and blue balloons dropped from the ceiling and Fleetwood Mac played "Don't Stop," I realized that I was a Democrat after all. It was not because I had changed ideologically; I had simply subordinated my fear of the political unknown to my hope for something better.
This, then, is how I have evolved from a naive young Republican, to a lapsed Libertarian, to a proud Democrat. What did it take? Courage. Hope over fear. Courage for change. Courage to take an unpredictable path. Not huge courage, but courage nonetheless. And trips to the post office. That place that keeps sending reams of paper to my home. Papers that must be sorted and filed. Papers that continue to inform who I am and how I got here.