Grrrrrr!

I couldn't find anyone that wanted to take a hike with me yesterday.  To be fair, I only made a few calls to 'outdoorsy-type' friends and family members and gave them less than an hour to realize that a chance to spend time among the trees with me would be their greatest gift of the weekend.  No dice.  Thus, I ventured to the great wild by myself.  My alone-ness allowed me to take random turns, scale the difficult trails and simply turn around if it suited my fancy.  While on the more difficult trail of my local mountain, I found myself leaning back, extending my left foot while extending my right arm for counter-balance.  Throughout this feat of natural balance that kept me from plummeting to my death, I started to think about the inner animal in all of us.  It is the animal that allows me to sense a potential fall and lean just enough to escape it.  It is the animal in me that can hear a twig break in the distance and ensure my cellphone is still in my pocket (an adaptive animal-meets-technology reflex) and keep my eyes out for Bad Guys.  

Up until this election, I've always thought that Republicans are more in touch with their inner-animals.  They are reactive, lean into the wedges that define social platforms and rely on tribal associations to create the in team and the out team.  We democrats often respond partly with anger and partly with hurt feelings- we don't understand why republicans deride the intellect that separates us from the lower beings on the food chain.  We wish they would focus more on the issues and less on the gut animalistic reaction to the emotive language associated with anti-real-Americanism.  But, Sarah Palin, has allowed the democrats to get in touch with their inner animals.  The visceral reaction of democrats towards the Alaskan Governor is one that should be easy for republicans to understand- they originally tapped into it.  She makes us bear our teeth, grip our claws and long to tear her down to protect the ways in which she threatens our tribe: the common good, humility in the face of great challenge and the ability to speak candidly about issues.  She is the alpha; that which can attract the most fervent members of her own tribe while making the auto-defense mechanisms that lay dormant in the opposing tribe finally mount up.

It is the animal in my that wants a John McCain loss to be highly correlated to his VP pick.  I want her to go down- not because she is a woman (stop accusing me of being sexist, you sexist Fox news announcers with perfect makeup and coiffed hair!), not because she is a maverick (a loose, self-defined term), not even because she so obviously is a pawn to the campaign and completely reliant upon them to define her 'core beliefs' (sounds very maverickish, huh?).  I want her to go down because she is a threat to my tribe.   I do not want folksy mean slogans to triumph over research and intellectualism.  I do not want "Do as I say, Not as I do" (abstinence education...) to rule my country.  Most of all, I do not want ignorance to win.  Call me a fool, but I still believe in democracy and have faith in the majority's rationality.  

** I do like that the top spell check option for Palin is "Plain".  So true.