Why I'm Not a Republican

I'm fond of saying that presidents are like quarterbacks--they get too much credit when things go well, and too much blame when things go bad. I also have said that regardless of their actions in office, no president has done anything that I can say tangibly affects my life. I've been rethinking that latter statement. In doing so, I've come up with 3 events that directly and negatively affected my life.

The first event occurred in 1969, when the Nixon administration instituted a lottery to determine the order of young men to be drafted into the military. Each birthdate was given a number from 1 to 365, with #1 being the first number drafted. I got number 100, and eventually got drafted 5 months away from college graduation. (My roommate and his twin brother got a number in the 360s and are still Republicans today!) So at 8 months of marriage I was shipped off to New Jersey for 4 months, and I blamed Nixon. It didn't help that he subsequently turned out to be perhaps the morally bankrupt president in history when it came to abuse of the power of the office.

Then in 1981, I was hired to be the baseball coach and basketball assistant at Northwest Nazarene College (now university) in Nampa, Idaho. We had college friends in the area. We sold our house and got ready to move. Just before we moved we discovered that President Reagan had cut the funds for the job I was going to have in the Migrant Education Department, and therefore it was impossible to go to Idaho. We did have to move, rented for a couple of years, a victim of a move that typifies conservative administrations--shrinking government. I have no problem with smaller government, except in this instance I was the job that was shrunk. Fortunately I had not resigned my teaching job in Tustin and had a really good year. Reagan later would perfect the concept of deniability in Iran-Contra, and I realize had become the nostalgic hero of all conservatives, but he hurt me personally at that time.

This brings us to George W Bush and No Child Left Behind. The irony of this program is that is big government at its worst, yet is championed by conservatives because, well, it was implemented by a Republican president. It imposes impossible demands on the public education system. I know conservatives are the ones who usually see a conspiracy in everything, but in this case, I felt it was a plan designed to insure that public schools would fail, and the classic conservative goal of the privatization of education would be advanced. It made my job so much more of teaching to the test, and less time for the affective part of education which was my strength. I have over 500 former students as facebook friends, and very few became my friend because I helped improve their understanding of Math and/or English. NCLB dehumanizes education and provides incredible pressure, not only on teachers, but on administrators whose job retention depends on test scores and nothing else. I've always said the impact of a teacher cannot be quantified, and it certainly has no relation to test scores. Rather, it's about an e-mail my daughter Jennifer received from a former student a few months ago. Paraphrased it said basically this, "Mrs. Russell, I made some poor choices after I left school, but I'm getting better now. When I hit bottom, I remembered what you and Mr. Lewis would tell me when I misbehaved--'do you really want to be that person you're being right now?' I finally decided I wanted to be the person you believed I could become. I want you to know that without your caring, I would be dead now." I can't tell you how proud that made this Dad. She forwarded the email to an administrator with the note, "does this matter?" Never got a response.

Back to my original point. Three negative events that impacted my life directly, and all came from Republican administrations. Like all people with political views of any kind, I could be using selective memory. In many political arenas my views are such that my ultra-conservative friends say that I'm "not a typical lefty." If this means I use my brain instead of a knee-jerk response along party lines then I agree. I usually voted the opposite of what the NEA recommended, usually because those recommendations served teachers rather than students. I believe abortion is wrong, that we need to control our borders, and we need to find a way to keep criminals out of the country (I like the old idea of a penal colony, which I would guess is a conservative point of view). At the same time, I think the bewst way to destroy the drug cartels is to make drugs legal, have them sold at government stores at 1/10 the price they are now, and thus reduce the market for the cartels to next to nothing. I know that will never happen, but I think we are foolish to think we can eliminate drugs in America and the bloodbath that is Mexico using current methods.

Personal experience aside, I think the part of conservatism that puts me off the most is the "let them eat cake" attitude towards America's poor. To me the most hypocritical thing many of my Christian friends do is give lip service to the concept that "everything I have belongs to God," but let the government try to redistribute a portion through taxation and it suddenly becomes, "this is mine, you can't take it." I've probably said that in a previous blog, but I think it bears repeating.

In closing, I have an uncle who has said in my hearing, "I don't believe you can be a Christian and vote for a Democrat." I wish I had had the courage to say to him (a former teacher), "I don't see how anyone can be in public education and vote for a Republican." My pension is very nice I admit, and better than most, but without Democrats in government, I would STILL be teaching, at probably less than $40,000 a year.