How My Semi-Adopted Daughter Converted 23 Republicans

Time for change

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Sat Jan-13-07 05:09 PM
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How My Semi-Adopted Daughter Converted 23 Republicans

I consider this a remarkable story because I have never, as far as I can recall, been able to personally convert a single Republican.

Hope (I�ll refer to her as Hope because her DU screen name is �Hope Against Hope�) is a 34 year old woman who fled to the United States from Angola in 2002 because her husband was trying to have her killed for giving birth to four daughters and no sons. She sought and obtained asylum in the U.S. in 2004. My wife and I took her into our home in July 2005 so that she could save up enough money to have her four daughters come to this country to live with her. Since coming to the U.S. she has worked full time as a nuclear pharmacy technician, while often simultaneously working a part time job or attending college classes as well.

In mid-December of 2005, after withdrawing $2000 from her bank in preparation for her trip to Africa to retrieve her four daughters, Hope was arrested and imprisoned for reason of �suspected terrorism� (I don�t know if she was formally charged.) I posted on DU a more complete story of this episode in December 2005, shortly after it occurred. To make a long story short, she was treated very rudely by the apparent FBI agent who arrested her, but she was fortunate enough to have both her employer and her lawyer come to the prison that afternoon to vouch for her and spring her from prison, after only a few hours of imprisonment. Upon arriving at the airport she was not allowed to board her plane because of her recent arrest. But her lawyer cleared things up for her so that she could leave the next day.

Hope chose the United States to flee to because she had heard that it had a Constitution and a government that protected people, and she considered it a land of �humanity, liberty, and equality�. My wife and I talked politics with her on frequent occasions, and she knew enough to consider herself a Democrat, but it was the trauma of her arrest and imprisonment that she considers to be a major spur to the intensity of her current political outlook.

She felt bitter about how she had been treated, about the profiling that led to her arrest and imprisonment, and especially about the fact that nobody ever apologized to her for her baseless arrest and imprisonment. She had very bad feelings about the Bush administration, and she felt powerless about the fact that she couldn�t vote, since she had not yet been able to obtain U.S. citizenship. She thought about how she could make a difference even though she would not be able to vote in the 2006 elections.

So Hope began talking politics with her co-workers, most whom she also considered to be her friends. They were almost all young Republican men. They mostly considered themselves Republican simply because their parents were Republican, and they were generally not very well informed on political issues.

Hope asked them if they knew what it meant to be a Republican. She talked with them about the Bush tax cuts which served only the wealthy. She talked with them about the war in Iraq. With those who were religious Christians she talked about the fact that George Bush and most other high level Republicans are religious in name only, using the name of God to hide behind and as an excuse for treating other people badly (She also quit going to her Catholic Church because of the pro-Republican prosthyletizing). She explained that the Democratic Party is the Party of tolerance and the Republican Party the Party of intolerance.

Most of all, she argued that they shouldn�t be blind followers, of their parents or anyone else, because political decisions should be their own, based on informed choice. There was much discussion and many questions. Hope told them that they should research the issues themselves, and she referred them to DU, which most of them have read on a regular basis ever since.

By the time of the 2006 elections, Hope had converted 23 of them, all young men (15 white, 5 Hispanic, 3 black). She feels confident that they have been honest to her about their conversions, and most showed her their Democratic voter registration card. She called every one of them on the day of the election, and all told her that they voted � for the Democratic candidates. She tells me that the main secret to her success was that she never got mad when disagreed with, yet she was persistent, she had close enough personal relations with the (former) Republicans that they were willing to listen to her, and their own research confirmed what she had to say to them.

I believe that there is a lesson to be learned here, and I hope that I (and many of the rest of us) can learn it well enough to convert a few Republicans before our country totally falls apart.