Voting Is Not A Game, There Can Be Serious Consequences

Competition in sports and other activities can bring us tremendous satisfaction from individual or team accomplishment, but after celebrating victory, life moves on to the next game or to the next part of life. Politics is NOT like a game. Election results can bring real consequences, good or bad, often depending upon point of view, in their aftermath. I've written here before about my father's competitive nature and how it affected his political views. He was long a staunch Republican, and he was against Democrats, not because he disliked them, but because they were on the "other team." One time he was talking with a guy out in the yard. When he came inside, he said the guy's name (I don't recall the name now, but this was about 45 years ago) and said he had gone to school with him. The man was running for a political office, county commissioner, I believe, and my father said all kinds of nice things about the guy. This all prompted me to ask, "So, you're voting for him?" He said, "No, he's a Democrat." If I remember correctly, he didn't even know who the Republican candidate was, but it didn't matter, because whoever it was, was on his team. This is how it worked in my dad's world.

Back then, the Republicans, or at least a part of the Republican Party, generally the more conservative part,* had long seethed over Social Security, a program established in the mid 1930s, during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but with a good deal of Republican support and some Democratic opposition.** Conservative and libertarian Barry Goldwater secured the 1964 Republican nomination for president, and Goldwater was no friend to anyone on Social Security, as he essentially believed it should be voluntary, an idea that could well have led to "Social Insecurity." Well my dad supported Goldwater and tried to play down Goldwater's rough edges, of which there were many. While an outspoken and honest person, Goldwater, in my opinion, hated living in (then) modern times and he would have preferred a more distant time, unless, of course, a time machine dropped him off as a poor person in the 1600s, where "work until you drop (dead)," was largely the way of life for the overwhelming percentage of people not in the nobility. An idea like Social Security would have sounded pretty good to old Barry in those circumstances, and let's forget about that "voluntary" stuff. Anyway, eventually, as with all of us who live long enough, my dad came face to face with the realities of getting older, and the opposition within the Republican Party to Social Security had continued, if not increased. He then saw that politics is not like some sporting event to be won or lost, but that elections could turn your life upside down, and at a time in your life when you had become highly vulnerable, older age. When Republicans took over both houses of Congress in 1994, the situation was much on his mind, as he mentioned how Republicans were too connected to big money interests just greedily rubbing their hands together, hoping to get those hands on Social Security money. How times had changed!  

* I need to point out, that in those times the two major political parties were not as they are today. I think it's safe to say that the most conservative elements in the country were in the Democratic Party, as the South was then known as the "solid South;" that is, it overwhelmingly voted Democratic by tradition dating to before the Civil War. This allegiance to the Democratic Party was HEAVILY reinforced in the post Civil War time, because the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and an anti slavery party, the party that led the Union in its defeat of the South, as well as in the occupation of the South (Reconstruction). The post World War Two "solid South," however, had been showing the strains of an increasing number of  Democrats moving to advocate for the breakup of segregation and fairer treatment of black Americans, a part of the population then still heavily located in southern states, although some black Americans began to move northward to large industrial cities in hopes of landing good paying jobs. The post World War Two Republican Party still had a fairly potent moderate to progressive wing, eventually led by New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller. Just my opinion, but the venomous part of conservatism was even in evidence back then, as some conservative Republicans absolutely HATED Nelson Rockefeller. That nasty element received lots of reinforcements in the times leading up to today, as the conservatives in the South shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans. Just to be clear, not all conservatives are like this, and wanting checks on spending and government power is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather they are worthy of debate.   

** For more on the establishment of Social Security, here is the link to an earlier article I did:
http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2009/09/yikes-were-already-socialists.html 

WORD HISTORY:
Virus-This word, closely related to "virulent," and more distantly related to "viscous," both words of Latin derivation borrowed by English, goes back to Indo European "weis," with the meaning, "slimy liquid." This gave Latin "virus," meaning, "plant sap, slime, foul smelling liquid, venom." English borrowed the word in the second half of the 1300s from Latin with the meaning, "venom;" thus also, "poison." By the first half of the 1700s, it was applied to "infectious substance," and by the 1970s, the idea of "infectious substance" began to be used for "transmittable computer program for malicious use;" thus, "computer virus."