When you are a child, you mimic your parents views. My father was a conservative and we lived in a part of NJ that has never voted for any Democrat. A solid republican zone. My father was one of the leaders of the republican party in our town. I remember idolizing Nixon as a child.
Things gradually changed as the Watergate hearings came to pass and Nixon was impeached by complete majority vote. I remember taping his resignation speech on my tape recorder and crying.
That really was the defining moment in my young life. I stopped believing in our political leaders and started to really question their motives. I remember one of my friends going off on Jimmy Carter and listing all the terrible reasons my he would bring our country to ruin and for the first time - I my head- I thought, this is just bullshit and it is coming straight from her father's mouth. I remember the realization of how hypocritical many of the people I knew growing up. I started realizing how removed we were from the "real" world. After all I grew up in an all white area. There were no minorities that lived there and their was no crime. The biggest crime news story that I can remember was when my neighbor's son had broken into the summer homes throughout the course of the winter months and stolen things like TVs etc. He had stored the loot under one of the houses on our block. That was the headline story in our paper.
There are certain defining moments that change you. I can say that Watergate broke my bubble. It made me question things. It made me also question religion. I started to gravitate towards science and the importance of our environment. I started to realize there was a lot more out there and started to think globally. I started to understand the importance of people over industry. I loved studying world history and evolution in college and I came to college with an attitude that a lot more open -minded.
Recently, there have been leaks to the news media about the underwear bomber, the attack in cyber space against Iran and several other secretive initiatives. These leaks put the people that are under cover in danger. They may have come from the white house. Hopefully the perpe- "traitors" will be caught soon. It is no secret that I have come to admire President Obama. I hope that he can act swiftly to catch the these leaks. I really do not agree with everything that has happened during his administration- mostly because I don't think he has done enough. But I believe he has done the right things to keep us out of economic despair. I hope that he gets re-elected because I think that he will try even harder to bring about reform when their is no threat of election-loss. I just hope that the same stupid idiots that run the fake VP office on HBO's Veep show aren't too true to life!
If you haven't had a chance to watch this series- I highly recommend it. Some people feel that it harms our image of our current administration. I think it is just plain hilarious!
