Guest Blog: Vote for Change

Today I'm happy to share with my readers this guest blog, written by my friend Karen Hansen Weese, from Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania.

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My mother has never been a sign-waving, political sort of person. She led the brownie troop, taught fifth grade, and was a wonderful mom to my sister and me. She voted every four years for the Republicans, and that was that.

But today she has election signs in her front yard, phone lists piled high on her desk . . . and the candidates she’s fighting for are Democrats.

Why? When I asked her recently, she pointed to my two-year-old son happily munching his animal crackers, and said, “Because of him.”

I am doing this, she told me, because the current administration has had six years to get its act together, and they have not. They have brought us a war started on the basis of lies, built on the hubris of men who have never seen combat, dreamed up without any kind of an exit plan, and conceived without thought for the young soldiers’ lives they would destroy. I don’t want my grandson to grow up in a nation where leaders launch wars to “make us safer,” and instead create a swarming petri dish for terrorism where there had not been one before.

I am doing this, she said, because I don’t want my grandson to grow up under leaders who wrap themselves in the mantle of Christianity, and then show their love and mercy for “the least of these” by cutting Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans. I don’t want him learning values from leaders who have expounded about ethics and then gone to dinner with Jack Abramoff, or waved the flag of patriotism and then left veterans’ families standing in line at the food bank. I don’t want him to grow up under leaders who talk about family values, but have forgotten to live them.

My mom is usually right about most things, and in this I know she is correct. This November she will cast her vote for change, and I will proudly do the same. I have a feeling we will not be alone.