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Top Comments: Coke vs Pepsi Politics Edition [1]
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Date: 2022-10-17
While at the grocery store recently, I remembered I needed to pick up Diet Coke for Mr. Brillig. He doesn’t like my Coke Zero Sugar, and I prefer it by a LOT over Diet Coke. As he and I were chatting while putting groceries away (and sipping our respective caffeinated sodas of choice) I remarked that “unlike our two major political parties, our disagreeing on which cola variant we prefer really IS a preference where all the options are Fine.”
[For the record, Casa Brillig is a Coke household. None of us like Pepsi although we will drink it in a pinch when that’s the available caffeine product. But we don’t dislike Pepsi People!!!]
I sat with that thought a while and thought back to when I was a teenager just beginning to pay attention to politics. My mother was a Democrat, and while I don’t know if she was registered as such she was a fervent supporter of her best friend, my godmother, also one-time head of our local Democratic party. My father was most definitely a registered Republican. We had family friends on both sides of the political divide, and it was OK. We all managed to eat Thanksgiving dinner together without bloodshed and while my parents eventually separated, political differences were the LEAST of what was wrong in their relationship.
It really felt to me that all those decades ago... before Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Tea Party and the rise of Christian Nationalism pervasive in the modern-day Republican Party, the differences between the two parties were primarily approaches to fiscal management, government services, and that both parties had the well-being of every American at heart. It was OK to be one or the other… even if I knew MY party (I’ve been a Democrat in both spirit and party affiliation since I first registered to vote) was The Best One, I didn’t have to worry that The Other One was going to strip my suffrage and toss me barefoot into the kitchen while denying food, shelter and medical care to people because of what they look like, who they love, or where they come from.
“YAY!! I have a diary topic DAYS in advance!!!” I said to K1 yesterday afternoon.
“Umm Mom? Do you think historically marginalized people would agree? Haven’t Republicans always been worse for us?” (yes, that’s a quote)
Cue scratching across vinyl album here
K1 had a very valid point. That cats and dogs living together in amicable harmony I was remembering so fondly likely reveals my status growing up as a cis straight (well, at the time, at least :-)) Christian middle-class white person in a mostly rural, mostly white area. I know that both Democrats and Republicans of the 60s-early 80s weren’t kind to LGBTQ people, but when I think hard about it, I do remember a general feeling around me that Republicans cared less about poor people, black people, and a whole lot of other people.
My conversation with K1 means my diary tonight doesn’t have a pithy little closing statement, because I find I’m left with questions I don’t know the answer to. Was there ever a time when ‘either party’ was respectable, truly? Thoughts? I’d love to hear what you have to say on this, after perusing tonight’s Tops!
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