27 October 2004, Fort Myers, FL
Another Red Sox victory last night. Miracles abound. Miracles coupled with hard work and eyes wide open.
Here is my own miracle: My father, John Tempest, the Marlboro Man without the cigarette, the tough-talking, charismatic pipeline contractor from Utah, who weeps when he speaks about Ronald Reagan; my father, a life-long Mormon Republican is voting for... John Kerry.
Why? How?
My father is voting for John Kerry for President of the United States because he feels George W. Bush has failed him -- on the economy, on health care, on the war in Iraq -- and in my father's own words, "What I will never be able to forgive him for is what he is doing to the West. The damage to the land out here is irrevocable. There isn't enough oil and gas here to bother with it."
This from a man whose business has been laying the pipe in the land that the oil and gas runs through for four generations.
But it goes deeper.
My father can no longer support George W. Bush because he has watched his son suffer with lymphoma and wonders, Why Steve? He never quite believed that his wife, our mother, was a downwinder, a hibakusha (Japanese word for radiation-affected people). There wasn't enough hard evidence for his pragmatic mind that cancers were caused by nuclear testing. But with his own son, his child, nothing made sense, especially as he learned that Steve and Ann's neighbor, Stuart Clark, and other neighbors, have also been diagnosed with lymphoma. It is not just a cluster, but an epidemic. The fact that hearings on the effects of nuclear testing in Utah and beyond were reopened this summer to see if the circle of inquiry should be widened, the fact that this administration of Bush and Cheney are seriously contemplating reopening nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, my father cannot support these actions. He now believes we are all downwinders, members of "a low use segment of the population," expendable citizens in the eyes of our government.
My father can no longer support George W. Bush because he has witnessed the atmosphere of fear that has attempted to silence his daughter by the president of the Florida Gulf Coast University, who chose to see her as a threat to the students for criticizing President Bush in print, when in reality what he really feared was the wrath of his Board of Trustees appointed by Governor Jeb Bush, which translated to loss of money which translated to his possible loss of power.
My father can no longer support George W. Bush because he is tired of the lies, how he is being told how well the war in Iraq is going, when we witness the contrary. My father can no longer vote for George W. Bush because somebody is getting rich on death, be it Halliburton in Iraq or the drug companies in America that care more about the chemotherapy infused into his son's arm than his son's cure.
How close does it have to get before we will register a change of mind and heart?
