I do a political podcast on Wednesdays, and told the people I work for about it — but for some reason, they always try to get hold of me while I’m “on the air.”
Maybe it’s because once I told them about it I stayed very, very quiet. It’s not smart to bring politics into business… and I’m a liberal Democrat performing services for a group of Fox News-watching conservatives.
My colleagues are lovely, nice people and everybody gets along. Why muddy the relationship by telling them they’re all wrong about Obamacare?
I save that for my family and friends… and the small audience that listens to the weekly MOMocrats MOMochat podcast.
As you can expect, this week’s show was not too jolly. We conducted a post-mortem on Tuesday’s election, and even though none of us were actually expecting it to go well, we had hoped for a few more bright spots than we got.
I am a lifelong news junkie: I grew up in interesting times (the 1960’s) and from the time I was in 5th grade until very recently, I read a newspaper every single day. The Watergate hearings took place the summer before I started college and like many others of my generation, I was inspired enough by Woodward and Bernstein to study journalism. I care what’s happening in the world around me…
…but in the last few years, that world has often become all too depressing and I need to take a break.
And that’s what I did on Tuesday night, while the sad election returns kept coming in.
My husband took me out to dinner.
I ordered a stiff drink.
And when I returned home, instead of watching news updates, I fired up Netflix for reruns of 30 Rock — because Liz Lemon’s world is so much nicer than mine. I mean, it’s funny.
While I’m not about to hide from all the news of the world, I think I will continue to step back a little bit for a while.
I’m not so upset that the GOP won elections in a bunch of red states — but that people like Mitch McConnell — who is responsible for a Congress that has been gridlocked for six years — gets rewarded for bad behavior. It offends me, not so much as a citizen, but as a mother. I’m upset that a few billionaires get to set the political agenda, instead of the American people — and that they’re willing to spend billions of dollars to buy politicians but balk at any suggestion that they pitch in a fraction of that expenditure in taxes to pay for roads and bridges and teachers and food for starving children.
I’m upset that the Senate will now be a mirror image of the House, where the Science committee is headed by people who think the world is just 6,000 years old.
I’m upset that the slow progress we’ve made towards universal healthcare will be chipped away by the new Congress. This comes on top of six years of fear and misinformation spread by the very people who devised the “free market solution” we ended up adopting.
There is so much wrong with our politics right now, is it any wonder I’m mainlining old sitcoms? Pass the remote… I think Friends is on.
I’m still upset by the results. And even more upset by the reports that say that if more of the younger, Democratic-skewing demographic had voted, the election would have turned out differently. Do you think that’s true?
I totally think that is true, at least in states where the Democrats haven’t been gerrymandered out of influence. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans (and they skew young). They tend to come out for the Presidential elections – but state and local elections are dominated by older, white, conservative voters (you know, retirees who have/make the time for it). The MOMocrats have been railing about this for the last two years: Our side may not have enough billionaires to BUY the country, but there is power in our numbers — it just needs to be exercised by VOTING. Why do you think there has been such an effort in red states to suppress voting among younger, poorer populations (who tend to vote Democratic)? Anyway — the next couple of years are going to be a nightmare (as if the last 14 have not been bad enough!)