Origin of a Species

I wasn't born a Republican. In fact, I don't know that I had any political affiliation until high school. There I began to understand the divide between angry or laughable Lefties and everyone else. I don't mean that facetiously. In my world, there are two types of people: the angry, disagree-with-me-and-suffer-my-wrath type and the people with whom one can disagree without feeling morally or physically stigmatized. In the former category I lump the Right and Left's moral crusaders.

Somewhere in my high school days I felt an instinctive dislike for people who claimed to speak for everyone except for themselves and who claimed that all of the people in power were idiots to a man -- except for their man.

So when I see the protestors, I feel something I don't like: their misstated signs (such as "liar"), their wide-eyed anger, their chants of peace and love shouted through tense jaws and sweaty, furrowed brows. They don't strike me as pictures of compassion or kindness or even intellectual fortitude. No. They are angry, emotional people, united only by hatred.

I don't know how many Righties found themselves on the Right side of the aisle because they just couldn't understand or be comfortable with the sign-wavers, the too-angry-to-think-straight types, or even the silly and whimsical Lefties who dress as cartoonish characters to feel different.

I don't know how many Lefties found themselves that way because they finally found a way to fit in somewhere.

I do know that now, after arguing about what feels like the same things with the same people for more than ten years, I am no closer to feeling comfortable with the anarchists, communists, radical feminists and other protest-friendly groups than I was then.

Give me a Democrat any day. Whether beer or champagne drinker, Toyota or Lexus driver, smoker or non-smoker, I don't care. But please let him be reasonable. This is the wish of one New Republican.

Now if you thought that the Olympics were the apogee of spectator sporting, just wait until the protests really get underway...