InnerTeub

I think living in DC for 12 years skewed me a bit with regards to elections. Election season in DC always seemed to be an intellectual exercise, where people weigh the pros and cons of a particular party winning and losing based on how it will impact their job and THEN their sensibilities, because, let’s face it, if you work in DC? Your job in some way revolves around which party is in charge, and if it doesn’t, then you are the only one of your friends and neighbors who can say so, so you play the game with them anyway.

This comes along with the added element of the fact that if you live in DC proper, it doesn’t matter anyway. DC never goes for the Republican party. The announce the mayor of DC after the democratic primary, for crying out loud. And that whole ‘Taxation Without Representation  isn’t just a clever licence plate tagline – it’s true: Congress holds the budget for DC programs, and we have no representation in Congress (unless you count a delegate that has no voting power, which I do not.) Any thought process or passion revolving around Senate and House races is probably because you work for a Congressman or Senator. Not because their ideals and values matter to you deeply (which is not to say that they don’t, it’s just to say how much they matter to you doesn’t matter because you’re not voting based on that; you’re not voting for them at all.)

All I am saying is: politics, when you live in DC, is an intellectual process, with much of the passion stripped out of it based on our proximity to the process itself (I asked a friend of mine who he wanted to win the election and he answered me by doing electoral college math based on various scenarios) and our lack of overall representation anyway. 

So you can imagine my surprise when I landed myself in suburban Colorado, a mere 20 miles from the Focus on Family headquarters, deep in Red country but in the heart of a swing state. There is no regard to process here, it is all passion. It’s a different experience for me; in DC it seems that you are heavily impacted by the process of electing officials, whereas out here in the middle of the country, you are impacted by the actual officials that are elected. Instead of (hypothetically) sitting in DC watching laws and policies get enacted that I disagree with and wondering how the rest of the country could get it so wrong, now I actually am the rest of the country. 

This is not to say I couldn’t get all riled up about politics before, but that now I can get riled up and I can DO something about it, and then I can chose to feel elated or crushed based on the outcome. It’s a different game.