The Lesson My Conservative Grandparents Taught Me About Democracy
It’s still quite shocking to me how divided our country is right now and how it feels like there is no gray area anymore.
My grandparents on my dad’s side have leaned Republican for at least as long as I have known them (I am now 36), but my parents are as liberal as they come. As I got older I was always fascinated about how this could happen, since it seems pretty common to be aligned with the political party of your parents.
Even though my grandparents aligned more with the Republican party I always appreciated the fact that they didn’t vote for someone based on their political party but rather on whether they agreed with the policies that candidate was fighting for. They always did their research on voter propositions.
Growing up I had a lot of assumptions about my grandparents, and since I knew they were more conservative I thought we wouldn’t agree on much. My grandma to this day still says she isn’t going to vote yes on any prop that is going to raise her taxes, and as far as I know she has stuck by that. But she also admitted to me that even though she voted for Trump for his first term she can’t stand him now and voted blue in the last election. As I got older I started to talk with them about different issues and realized we actually could agree on a lot of things even if we might not agree on how to solve the problems we saw.
So even though to me it seems like people vote based only on their political party, it is nice to know that there are people out there who don’t go along with everything their party does and vote instead on the values they believe are important.
Amanda
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