Grandfather of the year
by David Atkins
If the Republican shutdown of the government is getting you down and making you feel hopeless about humanity and the country, here’s something that should lift your spirits:
Remember that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The Dixiecrats fought to keep slavery. They lost. The Republican Party fought to prevent Social Security and to deny the New Deal. They lost. The Republican Party fought against Medicare. They lost. The Republican Party fought to stop Obamacare. They lost. The Republican fought to stop marriage equality and gay rights. And they’re losing.
It may take some time, and it may take a lost generation economically to seal the deal. But they’re going to lose this fight, too, as they’ve lost all the rest. Their revanchism will ultimately be short-lived.
If, in the broad arc of American history, the civil rights movement inevitably spawned the Reagan Southern Strategy backlash, which in turn must be undone by the same Millennial generation that Reaganism bankrupted, then so be it. It will have been worth it. We’ll suffer our lives with a worse economy and worse prospects than our parents, but all the while we’ll gladly dance at gay weddings on the interred remains of the political ideologies that caused the mess while giving our own children a better future. Let the Koch brothers’ fortunes comfort them when worms are eating the remnants of their bodies and their souls await whatever punishment a potential afterlife might have to give, even as their descendants are taxed on their inheritance by a generation of happy warriors who will gladly cast their greedhead parents as the villains of history.
And we’ll give a happy salute to all the amazing members of the previous generations like this grandfather, who stood and fought the good fight their whole lives even as their square conservative counterparts tried and failed to drag the nation into the mud. In the end, this child and his grandfather will shape the future even as his mother’s cruel, narrow beliefs are despised and ultimately forgotten in the sands of time.
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