I joined the Windham Democratic Town Committee shortly after our Dubya stole the last presidential election. I had to find a support group of some sort before my head exploded.
I had shied away from the Democratic Party ever since I could legally vote. I did not like Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis or Bill Clinton. I was of one mind and it was not Democrat and it was certainly not Republican. This all changed after W and Darth Cheney came to power.
In early 2001, when California started experience rolling blackouts as Enron played Mother-May-I with the newly deregulated electrical grid, it was pretty clear to my right brain that the situation was connected to the president and his oil company cronies somehow. It seemed really odd that the mainstream media failed to make any connections between Bush’s new energy policies and the blackouts.
My left brain told my right brain to stop connecting dots like some 5-year-old with a box of crayons. “You’re engaging in paranoia and conspiracy theory,” my Logical Left murmured across the corpus callosum to my Intuitive Right, “There is no connection between G.W. Bush and Enron…” And so my Holistic Lobe stopped speculating about politics and oil and went back to watching “Survivor.” It wanted to argue with my smarmy left brain but, not being very good at framing logical arguments, it just found a corner of my skull to sulk in.
When the events of Sept. 11 happened, neither hemisphere was shocked by it. We had been poking our military and illicit arms dealing noses into other countries’ businesses for decades. It was only a matter of time before some radical political group tried to take the game down to the U.S. end of the field. And the World Trade Center had been targeted before. But something about how those buildings came tumbling down just did not sit right with my right brain. Mr. Right wondered who might have “called in sick” that day at the WTC.
Almost everyone I came into contact with had become a mad-cow eating, red-blooded American super-patriot demanding somebody pay for Sept. 11. People who I thought were intelligent adults ranted about how all Muslims should be bombed back to the Stone Age because they were “sitting on our oil.”
People who I knew to be liberal-minded would change the subject when I started to talk politics. While my left brain was trying to make sense of the “news” Katie Couric and the Fox network was feeding it, my right brain started to believe that it might be a little paranoid crazy after all. It was like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” with normally sensible people being replaced by patriotic pods.
To be continued…
Send questions/comments to the editors.
