Growing up and growing a heart

I have a deep, dark secret: I was once a member of the East Harris County Republican Club in Houston, Texas.

I’m not proud of it. Given the option — and 20-20 hindsight — I’d have been chosen to be a piano player at the Chicken Ranch or a “temporary guest” in the Ellis Unit in Huntsville. Or maybe even the spotter for Lee Harvey Oswald.

Anything but a Republican.

It’s doubly shameful because my family is steeped in Texas politics. Texas DEMOCRATIC politics. My grandfather was the second cousin of one of the most famous U.S. senators from Texas. Our whole family tree is full of Texas Democrats who were mayors, freemasons and Klansmen (it WAS a different era).

Later, one of my uncles ran Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign in our East Texas county. Shoot, I was the only kid at Davy Crockett Elementary with an “HHH” bumper sticker on my three-ring binder notebook.

But I was brainwashed by a managing editor at my very first daily newspaper. I won’t identify it, but it sounds like The Jaytown Fun. That managing editor went on to become an administrative aide for a Republican who beat out a longtime U.S. rep in Texas, and I was sooooo impressionable that I didn’t see what was happening at the time.

(An aside, all those who complain about “the liberal media” never worked for a newspaper. The rank and file may be largely liberal, but we don’t make the rules or assignments. That’s done by the bosses, the ones with the wallets.)

There’s a debate over just who said it first, but we all know the condescending GOP blather, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.”

Maybe it’s because I’m now 60, and the whole thing runs in 20-year cycles, but I’m back in the liberal fold. Have been, though, for my whole life, except for that brief stint at The Jaytown Fun.

And why is that? It’s BECAUSE I have a brain. I can see the lies that are coming from Republican lips. I’ve seen that “Trickle Down Economics” A) does not work and B) is a really nice “Mad Men” — worthy turn of phrase that means “Screw you, I got mine.”

I’m a liberal not because I’m part of the media, but because I’m part of the human race. I care about my neighbors. It doesn’t really MATTER if they care about me. I think every kid has a right to a free college education, that healthcare is a right and not a privilege, that we owe it to our kids and grandkids to make sure there is an Earth to pass along to them, that money spent on the arts and research ‘n’ development is never wasted and that love isn’t defined by orientation or gender. And if it means my tax dollars go to support all this, I’m fine with it.

Mostly, though, I believe Donald J. Trump is the Antichrist. I suspect his doctor never did an EKG — I mean how can you check heart function if there is no heart? And there is not one solitary individual in his inner circle, from the traitor Jared Kushner to the opportunistic Ivanka to the unscrupulous Rex Tillerson to the Cruella DeVille of Education, Betsy DeVos, who actually would cast an image in a mirror.

I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from back in the Civil Rights era. It was a bunch of racist farmers armed with pitchforks, hoes and such chasing blacks. In this panel, one redneck turns to another and says, “Let that one go! He says he don’t want to be my equal.”

That’s where I am now. I have realized that all the logic and rational explanation in the world isn’t going to convince a Trump-loving asshole (I apologize for the redundancy) that 45 IS a lying, narcissistic, misogynous, greedy, racist, planet-hating twat, and the tweeting Nero to our Rome.

So I tell myself  “Let that one go; he don’t want to be my equal” every time one of those trolls attacks me or one of my fellow snowflake libtards (I’m putting that on a business card one day). I tell myself that but rarely am I able to do it . . . because I have a heart.

Thank God.