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Closing Thoughts on Arizona, Jesus, Democracy

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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Closing Thoughts on Arizona, Jesus, Democracy

Submitted by Caroline Hunter on Tuesday, October 5, 2010

In Massachusetts, it’s always been clear to me: Jesus was a Democrat. He often used flowery language and parables instead of giving direct answers. He was a neighborhood guy, but didn’t make promises about bringing about new prosperity. He rarely, if ever, had sex and constantly pointed out people’s hypocrisy. He was an Irish Catholic Democrat, to be sure.

For the past week, I’ve been in Arizona registering voters in preparation for the first big election since the state’s infamousSB1070 legislation was written. What a wildly, wonderfully different place!

Arizona is one-third Democratic, one-third Republican and the last third is Independent. After speaking to hundreds of people every day here for over a week, I’ve come to see that politics can be more than the cartoon I've come to see it as. Newt Gingrich isn’t just the guy with a squinty face spewing ignorant values into the public sphere; neither is Barack Obama the captain of a ship headed toward financial stability and national dignity. I am not an audience for either of them.

I am a person out in 100-plus degree weather working to get people to care about a political system of which I can't grasp a definition yet. Alongside my team of PromiseArizona colleagues, I am trying to figure out if I’m a narcissistic do-gooder with a political agenda that I refuse to expose even to myself; or if I am more akin to Glenn Beck, a man so sincere in bereaved, irate confusion that he spreads it to the otherwise-logical. From within the Catholic and academic hierarchies I've grown up in in Massachusetts, his apparent intellectual humility can be a relief; Glenn claims to not even know what he's going to say before he says it.

No, I don’t want to be an American Idiot, but I’m not sure anymore what defines one. Or if I want to participate in an American politics that can’t function without someone being pinned as one type of donkey or another.

I feel closer to Jesus this week because I’ve been getting a tan and getting my feet dirty on the ground here in Arizona. I feel more American in that I’m finding ways to reinvent myself in an environment different from what I have known.

Maybe those feelings are the same one. Maybe not. I only care about the people I’ll meet tomorrow, and with whom I’ll vote on November 2.

posted by William Temple at 5:31 AM

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