Thursday, September 3, 2009

I love my Dad.  He’s a great guy, he does good works, and he is committed to doing the right thing.

He’s also a minister by schooling and training and a self-taught computer techie and administrator later.  Now he’s crashed on my couch and taking the T into the convention center everyday for political planning going on down there.  Like I said, I love him, but he has an idealist streak a mile wide and I’m sure that it’s gonna get him in trouble.

Gil hasn’t been involved in any kind of politics above the city level since the the SDC went belly-up in the sixties — he once confided in me that he felt guilty for ’selling out’ and not continuing on with the Weathermen like some of his compatriots.

Well, now he’s a representative of what we can best call the old-Hippie Party.  These veterans of yesteryear’s culture wars are intent on seeing that the New England central government conforms to their more egalitarian hopes.  

And it’s driving me nuts.

Gil is spending all his time in committees trying to get a ‘right to employment’, trying to define a national minimum wage over $10/hour, trying to make all education funding come from regional income taxes instead of property taxes.  When I try and point out that there are more important issues to get defined – common defense, appeals courts, foreign policy, election policy  - he gets strident saying that we have to make sure that the foundations of New England don’t repeat the mistakes that made the USA so systematically corrupt.  My retort was that then he should be working to avoid a unitary executive, unless he liked the idea of living under General Carlson’s guns for the foreseeable future.

Gil thinks that if the people all get a fair shake, everything will turn out OK.  I don’t.  There’s always a opportunity somewhere for someone to grab power — they will always try to make that grab.  The best way to prevent that is to make it in someone else’s interest to grab their arm first.  Politics of divisiveness Gil calls it.

My father is so optimistic, so positive…I’m gonna kill him.