Sacrifice...and why we must not give up

First of all, I feel that I need to comment to Schmidlap's scathing excoriation of John Mayer. Schmidlap, his concert in November '02 was the scene of the first date with the now Mrs. Zinfandelfan (carrying Zinfandelfan 1.0, in beta version until release tentatively around 6.Feb). Having apparently fallen play to those who would do my musical tastes harm, I must now confirm with you whether or not artists I plan to listen to are worthy. Thanks.

Allow me to first say that I love my wife. Dearly. As a man on the radio once remarked, the continued generosity of women never ceased to amaze him. He's right. They're capable of amazing things.

This is the first year that I've been more than just a political bystander. I've voted Democratic in the past (don't think I ever punched straight ticket) and in the folly of my college yute even voted Perot. But to see what is happening with the country, its leadership and propogandist attacks being waged on the populous (knowing or otherwise), I felt the urge to get more involved.

So I've contributed out of my own pocket to candidates. Webb, Tester, Lamont, Seals, Laesch. I know that I should've contributed before Q3 closed, but I'm doing it now regardless. Over dinner tonight, I broached the subject with my wife that I felt that we should contribute. Since it's a 'we' thing, then it needs to be an 'us' discussion; if you're married you know how it goes.

She said that no, we don't have the money to contribute right now, what with a baby on the way and a nursery and furniture to pay for, as well as a lovely patio that doesn't get as much traffic as I'd like it to get. I posed it in the frame of, "I think we should make a sacrifice someplace to be able to afford this. Do you feel that we can and should?" "No."

When I tried to honestly further delve into the reasons, she said that I was the rabid political wonk of the family and she doesn't really feel as strongly and passionately about it as I do. She's right about that. I've usually got multiple windows running in Firefox pointed to the home pages of Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo and refreshing them every fifteen minutes or so during the day to see what's going on.

My wife doesn't like when I continue to ask badgering questions. I try to do it in my inside voice, but she's as stubborn as a tick when she's made up her mind and the reason she gave to me finally was that, "They're all politicians so they're all corrupt and crooked, anyways." I explained that I wasn't contributing to incumbents, but rather people trying to get rid of ones who do perpetuate that stereotype, but it still didn't move her.

We contributed last year to the Red Cross in the wake of Katrina, so I asked why we did that. She pointed out that we both thought it was a good idea. I then continued the prosecutor's line of questioning (quietly, politely, as she got more and more defensive and belligerent) to determine what made an in-your-face disaster worse than a slowly-growing-cancer disaster and, more importantly, wanted to know what it would take to move her off her position. She could offer me no answer and the way she started playing with her dinner informed me the conversation was done and she was pissed.

And it made me realize that this is the exact type of apathy that we have to overcome this year. This inertia of, "Doesn't matter to me now, doesn't impact my day-to-day way of life." We're fortunate, I guess, that we haven't had to make any sacrifices to this point; but it doesn't mean that others haven't. At last count, more than 2700 have made the ultimate sacrifice. Their families and friends grieve for something that isn't a little temporary pain; it's going to be a lifetime of pain. They'll never forget.

Schmidlap is fortunate to be in the futures business. He's used to thinking and contemplating what the long position is on things. My wife sees many things in the here and now; she couldn't and still doesn't see the benefits of replacing the lights in our home with LED bulbs for the long term energy savings. She sees that the bulbs are a) expensive and b) we've still got other bulbs and aren't we wasting our money throwing them away? When you run the long numbers, yes, it's an expensive investment now, but the savings is tremendous.

But I'm not going to let this get me down. We live in Judy Biggert's district; another great rubber stamp. I've met her and her chief of staff through work, and it makes for interesting feelings of conflict I've yet to sort out in reconciling my personal and professional agendas as it comes to interacting with the Illinois Congressional delegation. Since Joseph Shannon hasn't done dick to make it a fight here (he's got two strikes in my book, pro-life AND a graduate of the University of Notre Dame law school), I just signed up online to volunteer for John Laesch and Tammy Duckworth.

We're into the home stretch; it's four weeks from tomorrow. We're all busy and have work, family and other pressures. But these people who are running to take back our country are sacrificing THEIR lives for the betterment of their constituents and ultimately for us all. They've taken the long position; shouldn't we?