True Blue

 I suppose I could blame Michael J. Fox for setting up the expectation that there is some sort of pendulum swing between parents' and their children's political beliefs. The raging conservative that Mister Fox played on Family Ties all those years ago made me imagine that my son would probably end up being a QAnon follower and every family gathering would require a conscious avoidance of anything topical. Alex P Keaton was a model of a parent's worst fear: Having offspring you don't want to have sitting around the holiday table. 

Okay, first of all I should confess to not having watched too many episodes of that particular sit-com, mostly because the premise and Mister Keaton/Fox made me less interested by powers of ten. That was because of my deeply held liberal convictions. Growing up in the hippie haven that was Boulder, Colorado in the sixties and seventies probably would have been enough to cement those views, but I believe that I came by them the old fashioned way: I learned them. 

My mother made a pact with my older brother that she would ride with him on his motorcycle to Canada if he was ever drafted. She made this commitment about the time my brother turned fifteen, the year that the United States ended the conscription of their young men. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that this promise was made in fervent good faith, much in the same way that my mom became a subscriber to Ms. Magazine, starting with issue one. Her dinner table pronouncement went something like this: "I'm getting a subscription to Ms. Magazine." Pause. "Can I?"

Which is not to say that she felt she needed permission, but she was on the cusp of a new paradigm, and shaking free of all those shackles was not easy. Nor I am sure was all the tension created in a neighborhood of straitlaced IBMers and their families as she opened her doors to all of us kids and let us make fun of the President, even if we weren't exactly sure why, but Tricky Dick Nixon was a man who was not to be trusted. 

My father wore his own bleeding heart on his sleeve, fearlessly bridging the generation gap that might have existed between him and they longhairs who came and went out of our lives. He even served as a delegate for Jesse Jackson at the Colorado State Democratic Convention. He was proud to be the bald white guy portion of the Rainbow Coalition. 

So why did I suspect that my own son might be anything but a branch on the same tree? Michael J. Fox. Turns out I needn't have worried. He was the one who picked up Beto O'Rourke's Twitter feed, and has been helping his old man struggle with all this pronoun business. Growing up in Oakland with your eyes and ears open, it might be difficult to end up on the red side of things, and at least one of his very good friends in high school drank the MAGA Kool-Aid. Which makes it hard for him to hang around with his buddy for extended periods. That's unfortunate. And even though we see eye to eye on most things, we still find a few topics that are off limits. Like the continued need for more Fast and Furious movies.