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How I Lost My Cleaning Lady and Other PC Ways to Lose People in Your Life

Maria-Victoria-A.-Grageda-Smith

By: Victoria G. Smith

 

I also recall the early years of my marriage when my husband and I often had quarrels—even in bed!—over the Bush presidency and the war it waged with a country that to me appeared to have had nothing to do with 9/11 but rather securing oil resources for the U.S.. I believed that the negative ramifi cations of what Bush and his team were then doing to our country would surely hit us for decades to come. Now, fi fteen years later, I draw no pleasure from having been proven right. The Republican Party bred its own monsters in its desire to hold onto political power, not the least of which is its sitting president—an intellectually destitute, morally corrupt, shameless man devoted only to the cause of himself, who has thereby forever tainted the dignity of the highest offi ce in our land. During the 2008 elections, I was happy to hear my husband fi nally say he could no longer in conscience vote Republican, given his realization that the party’s platform was wrong on every social issue. But prior to this, our marriage was indeed tested by our political differences. This sounds ridiculous, I know, especially when I had to ask the ultimate question whether I was ready to quit my marriage because my husband was Republican. So I drew inspiration from the successful marriage of high-profi le political strategists Mary Matalin, a Republican, and James Carville, a Democrat. If they could do it, so could we, I thought.

And my husband and I have overcome and succeeded, I believe, because we never gave up on our basic trust and respect for each other that no matter how far our differences of political opinion were, we were both truly sincere in reasonably believing them, and therefore it was a matter of trying to understand where we each were coming from and to examine the bases upon which we believed what we believed, and most importantly, by staying in the conversation, instead of bailing out of the dialogue. What my husband and I did to stay married despite our initial sharp political differences is a microcosmic model of what we Americans need to do as a nation in order to break free of the stalemate and stagnation caused by our extreme polarization. This is my Valentine message to America. In addition, what Giuseppe di Lampedusa stated through his characters in his celebrated novel, “The Leopard”, is critically instructive: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” For we Americans to remain a free, united, and democratic republic, we need not only change the dynamics of how we talk with each other, but also our minds, when confronted with the truth. I suppose this is the other problem.“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked in the fi rst century, A.D., echoing the timeless question all philosophers posed through the ages. And then he washed his hands of it. Perhaps because he was a shrewd politician, he understood that what most people see as truth is mostly merely the perception of what’s true promoted by people in power. And then some of us have built upon this by elevating lies as “alternative facts”.

Nevertheless, the key is to stay in dialogue, no matter how diffi cult, and to be willing to change our position for the greater good of our country when confronted with logic and verifi able facts that contradict our beliefs, accepting that the matter of facts is not a matter of opinion. It’s cowardly to take fl ight when the fi ght for the very soul of our nation inevitably becomes intense. And it’s downright unpatriotic, even suicidal to choose party over country at a time like this.

(All rights reserved. Copyright ©2020 by Victoria G. Smith. For more on the author and her literary works, go to VictoriaGSmith. com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith)

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