That's a good question
and happy 50th birthday dad!

02 05 08 - 02:54. Category:

There are things you don't discuss with family, and for me it is sex and politics. Unless my grandma is on a wine-supported anti-Bush rant (I love her so). I'm sitting in my mom's sewing room as she's hemming my new suit slacks and an Obama add came up...

"Derek, do you follow politics?" she asks me. "Yeah, a bit" I reply. I don't read or watch everything, but I'll watch debates and The Colbert Report and follow the primaries as they happen. "What does liberal mean?" she poses to me. You would think I'd be dumbstruck and saddened at my mother's lack of awareness, but mostly I was surprised. The only answer I could give on the spot was "not republican *laugh*."

But what is it really? I suppose you could say it is a combination of political and social opinions. But that seems like a weak definition. And those are just the things that we define in relation to the bad guys. I couldn't give her a good answer, because I wanted to really say what it means to be liberal, but I couldn't. The only context I could think in was liberal in the sense of the opposition of conservatism. Which is largely what it is, but there has to be something more to it.

Everyone brings up gay rights, guns, and abortion but those are just political cannon fodder. It's a way of thinking and looking at our world that I have a hard time putting a definition on. Might you have one?

I was also proud of my mother. She voted for Bush, I'm sad to say, both times his name was on the ballet. I'm not entirely sure why, she's never clarified. But despite being at one point in the conservative camp, she can ask me that simple of a question because she wanted to understand what liberal really was, why it was the bad guy (according to her cousins, which is where this all started), and why Obama and Clinton are "too liberal" to be president because to her they don't seem all that bad. Asking that question is a lot more than many people in this country do. 

I'm disappointed that I couldn't give her an answer.