Family and Politics

I don't know how it happened that I got so lucky with my family. I went down south to visit brother and wife Jason and Chris this weekend...it was a lot of fun. It was kind of a dual birthday celebration even though I didn't get either one a present :/. Fun times, though I won't mention the atrocities of Saturday night or the calamitous ramifications on Sunday. Nah, instead I'll talk about fun and kids.

So, let me tell you what I did and that it was really fun. Me, Chris, Tyler (youngest bro, 17) and Katie (niece, 9) played keep away in the living room with a pair of my socks (clean, of course). Yup. Keep away. We played in the living room, and adjusted the rules slightly so that if you were over the age of 10 and you were touched while holding the socks, you were it. It's the kind of thing you'd think we were just doing for Katie...but no. All four of us were pretty into it. OK, all four of us were very into it.

I don't really know what to make of it. How can people spend so much time bored when it's so easy to have fun? I guess the real situation is that I'm lucky to have other people who can have fun doing simple things. I have to admit, Katie was a bit of an impetus - I doubt we would have played without the kid there as well. Jason did a good job finding Chris, she fits right in with the weird family that will do things like that...the kind of family where all 4 boys play ping pong, ddr...everything.

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On a completely different subject...I was looking for an interview of Leonard Peikoff for Lydia a while ago, and the recent election has kind of brought something he talked about here (that link won't stay good if you're reading this far in the future, but I'm quoting the relevant part anyway).

How you cast your vote in the coming election is important, even if the two parties are both rotten. In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.

Socialism - a fad of the last few centuries - has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades. Leftists are no longer the passionate collectivists of the 30s, but usually avowed anti-ideologists, who bewail the futility of all systems. Religion, by contrast—the destroyer of man since time immemorial - is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government.

Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because "both are bad."

First off, let me say that so far I'm not particularly fond of Peikoff. Peikoff follows Rand's books like a Bible - his viewpoint always seems to match hers exactly, beyond the point of logical deduction and closer to a kind of worship. I feel that Peikoff does not come to his own conclusions but rather attempts to mirror Rand...I wonder if wears a bracelet "wward" (sigh, that joke really had potential, but I couldn't deliver it well for some reason).

Anyway, now that you're done reading that it's really irrelevant. It doesn't matter if I like Peikoff because it's not him we're talking about, it's his ideas. Or in this case, a particular idea of his. Democrats = socialism and Republics = religious rule. The reason this has stuck in my head is because I (sadly) believe there's a lot of truth here. Sure, originally the republican party was in favor of big business and individual power while democrats...well they want more governmental programs but at the same time more constraints on big business. Obviously that's changed -- I'm fairly sure we've got the majority of those with the lowest economic status supporting Bush, for example (where democratic governmental programs would help them and republican big business support would hurt them).

So is it fair to say the Republican party is turning into the "Christian" party? Bush does say he is a Christian, and I think that there are a large number of Christians who want a Christian president. I wish this wasn't the case - I wish that Christians would realize that it's immaterial whether or not they are right, separation of church and state is the way to go. Religious empires fail, and religion corrupts government more than, well, anything. Obviously this is a dandelion wish, not something I actually foresee happening.

I'm done.