My entire family consists of two first cousins and the offspring of one of them. The one with the offspring is more like a sister to me. Let’s call her Jill. I’ve always liked that name and would have liked it for my own … but I digress.
Jill is ten years my senior. In 1959, we watched the Democratic convention on her small black-and-white TV and were both thrilled at the nomination of John F. Kennedy. Jill had married young and just had her first daughter, an infant at the time, who would, like her two sisters to come, grow into a progressive Democrat despite being raised by two staunch Republicans.
In 1959, however, I didn’t know Jill was, or would grow to be, a staunch Republican. I don’t know that I even knew what a Republican was. I recall a playmate once asking me if I was a “Demo-rat,” and wasn’t sure about that either, except from her tone, which was decidedly derisive, I knew that was not a good thing to be if I wanted to be her friend. I didn’t.
Flash forward. Jill and I have managed to go pretty much our entire lives without discussing politics. Maybe because I always assumed, and she had given no indication otherwise, that she was, like me, a Democrat. Let me just say unequivocally that my cousin is one of the most gentle, loving, caring and generous people I’ve ever known. Truth be told, she is much nicer than I am. Much. So imagine my surprise when, upon a recent visit, I discovered that not only is she a fan of hate-mongerers Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, but that Fox is her sole source for news, the voice of Rush Limbaugh accompanies her morning cup of tea, and she has cancelled the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper she read her entire life, because suddenly it is “too biased.”
I first became aware of our political differences during this last presidential election. A total news junkie, I eagerly shared with her articles expressing viewpoints from the left, jokes trashing McCain/Palin, and my personal impassioned support for Obama. I honestly, and clearly naively, believed that we shared these opinions or were at least in the same ballpark. Maybe she preferred Hillary. I could live with that. What never occurred to me was that Jill could be as firmly entrenched in the views of the right as I was in those of the left, although I had been told as much during the Bush-Kerry race by her sister who had informed me that she was strongly supporting Bush/Cheney and so was Jill. Okay, Jill’s sister, I can understand. She and her husband took to the woods a long time ago. Literally. But Jill … no. That was not possible.
