I am sitting here on a cloudy day and I am listening to Enya and I am contemplating how lucky I was to have two parents who were liberal urbanites. So many of my friends were fleeing conservative, rural upbringings, and here I was with a mother who completely supported my transition.
I can’t be sure that my parents would 100% agree with all of my current political views, the Silent Generation just has a different reflexive reaction to the word “socialism” than a GenXer who’s spent her whole life with everything that remotely smacks of “what if society gave something to everyone instead there being seven middlemen taking a cut in every aspect of everyone’s lives” as “socialism”. But they were left-leaning for the entire length of their lives that overlapped with mine, with careers and passions that kept them a good way out of the Fox News spiral. It’s really hard to imagine a world where they are both still alive and voting Republican, it feels much more likely to imagine my mom dragging herself to the local DSA meetings if she hadn’t died a few years back, to be honest.
And it is kind of depressing to realize that this is so not the norm across all of America. I wish all of my friends could have hippie lefty parents like I did.