One of my favorite movie scenes is from "The Wizard of Oz" when the Cowardly Lion wakes up with snow falling on his face in the poppy fields. He looks around, yawns and says, "Strange weather we're having."
I feel the same way about politics these days. The Republican Party has gone off the rails and is full throttling it down the path of fascism. Wrapped up in their rhetoric glorifying rugged individualism is an apparent abandonment of understanding our nation as a nation of kinfolk. No one with any moral sense or compassion would treat his or her family like the Republican Party is treating its fellow citizens -- the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and women. It is as if the whole party has embraced the cruelty of Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" with ecstatic glee.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, borders on the pathetic. They remind me of submissive wives beaten silly by ruthless husbands whom they nevertheless continually proclaim to love. How does one intervene in such twisted dysfunction? Until the battered comes to her senses and seeks a better life, one is unable to help. But fear continually limits her imagination and prevents her from believing in her worth.
Politically, we are living in a time of increasingly strange weather. Neither political party offers hope for normal folk who simply want to live a life, work a decent job, get married, have kids, grow old and say at the end of their days, "life is good."
Neither political party has a moral vision of the way the world ought to be. The Republicans want to return to the good old days of a wealthy white elite controlling a pacified majority who knows its place.