This is an election thread, but without the partisanship. Or ranting. It’s about my mom. And please, since I’m making this non-partisan, let’s keep it that way.
My mom is a sweet, grey-haired, grandmotherly woman. She also has been completely, completely oblivious to current events for most of her life. For the longest time she didn’t have a remote clue. I remember one time she, my dad and me were with a group of people and they were talking about the president at the time (I think it was Reagan.) They mentioned George Bush, the Vice President. My mom piped up with, “Who’s George Bush?” I could almost see my dad sinking deeper into my chair. He was pretty astute about political issues, and here his wife didn’t even know who the Vice President was!
Fast forward many years. My dad has passed away. I don’t know what has transformed in my mom, but she’s now really keeping up on political issues. During the 2000 election, she kept a chart of all the states, how many electoral votes they had, and what the polls were saying about each of them. She was really keeping tabs on the status of things. She talked about Florida more than a few times, but I was sort of tuning her out.
The night of the 2000 election, they called it for Geo. W. Bush. I was watching the news with my mom. She looked at her scary charts and graphs and said, “No, something isn’t right. Something’s going on with Florida.” I was saying, “Look. Bush won! They said it on the news.” She frowned and said, “Oh, I don’t know…something is going on.”
Of course the rest is history.
Well, this time I was going to pay attention to mom. She still had her scary graphs and charts. I tried to get her to start a blog, because, well, everyone else was doing it. But she’s not terribly computer savvy. I tried to listen to any pearls of wisdom she had, but again, I missed it.
For a while before the election, she was talking about people voting their “morals.” Yeah yeah, mom, I thought. She kept on repeating that, and I just missed the significance of it. :smack:
What do I need to do next time, to exploit this? She’s obviously onto something, and I seem to keep missing it!
Oh, and I keep telling her: my dad would be so proud. Shocked, but proud.