(#6057) Your fear has to be strong to be a republican

      I was thinking this morning of why some of my relatives are republicans when for the earlier part of their lives they were democrats. This one concept came to me and I have not been able to dislodge it as a real solid answer. Fear. When we were younger we had the world in front of us and were motivated to change it for the better. But now that many of us are older we are no longer interested in shaking things up because we have accepted what is and want to now protect it as we have become part of it. So instead of still trying to make the world better some are now loud and silent about that.
     They have invested their resources and lives into the status quo and are now part of the problem. To shake things up requires courage and for too many the idea of being courageous is a fearful thing beyond their capacity to accomplish. So instead they hold their noses at republican leaders who are a travesty by no other definition and either quietly avoid acknowledging their support for misogynists, rapists, and racists or brush off such claims with self delusional hypocrisy. They, these republicans, have found the courage to defend the indefensible because it is their, I'm scared, way of life they ignorantly are trying to protect. So the hell with truth, facts, and ethics if they are an impediment to their narrative of intolerance.
     What all this underscores is that republicans only have the courage to deny equality, freedom, fairness, and justice to anyone not them. Otherwise they are afraid to defend the concept of all of us together in harmony. Beneath their fear is a mixture of greed and ignorance that helps justify to them their battle to keep the status quo. Well I am ashamed for them to have settled for being okay with their choice to be a dishonorable human being. I see who they are so they do not come around me as a rule. I do not let them off the hook either as a compromise. They are wrong and will not be allowed in my presence unless and until they face their own frailty and rejoin the rest of us in the fight to bring true democracy to the world.