I’ve Felt This Way, Too

From Bill Peach, Franklin, TN:

“I don’t know how much of the 2012 presidential election campaign you have watched. It started way too early and will last way too long. I have come to realize that everything I learned in school and Sunday school, everything I have ever read, and everything I have ever thought have no relevance to the Republican primary debate.  I watch with masochistic agony and cling to every word, every nuance of speech, every emotive image, every mundane reference, and then I realize they are not talking to me.  I am not one of their people.  They don’t know or care that I am watching and listening. They are speaking to an audience with a political ideology that has no meaning for me. I cannot ignore them because that audience will still be there in November, when one of those candidates, as a diametric of his appeal to that audience, will make me appreciate the admonitions of my grandmother, and my roots in a one-room church and one-room school, and my seven-decade college education, and my love for my wife and daughters and grandchildren, for my years of work for public education and teachers, intellectual freedom, my fifty-two years of main street economics, the Christian ethic, human rights, and democracy. “