Don Quixote... Confusion...The Nature of Reality 

This election season, indeed the current political climate in America, reminds me of Cervantes' very serious work that tells the story of a man unable to accept the realities of a new age.  El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panze, to be his squire... I don’t have to go on with the analogy except to suggest that Don Romney and Squire Ryan are tilting mostly at windmills while there are serious problems to be addressed which they seem to misunderstand.  My grandmother would have said about them, “They mean well, but they are misguided.”

Paul Ryan is being hailed as the intellectual energizer for the Republican Party. It’s not a surprise that Ryan is considered an intellectual by Tea Party folks and others who are positioned to the right of wiser moderate Republicans and far to the right of many young people who have grown up in Republican families but are coming of age in an America that their elders refuse to acknowledge.  Ryan has enough cheerleader energy and down-home likability to excite the aging Republican base in the heartland.  He is even exciting news for some members of the Young Republican organizations in American colleges; but most bright young Americans coming to university from conservative, moderately affluent, often religious families are not eager to join young Republican groups... especially if they have studied under intellectually challenging high school teachers who taught them to look for logic in everything, even in religion and in politics.  Many younger Republicans are less likely to be bothered by the idea of two adult persons of the same gender committed to each other in ways that their parents or their church communities still find repugnant. They find absurd the suggestion that a woman who has been raped should not be allowed to have an abortion.  They are less likely to accept their parents belief that the Bible or any other “sacred” book must be accepted as the literal word of God. They are less likely than their parents to ignore the plight of students they have known in school who come from desperately poor families or to blame the poverty of impoverished families on the poor people themselves.  Young Republicans in college, individually or clustered in organized groups have seldom been considered to be the intellectuals of a university. In the past they have been a social club that plans parties and introduces its members to the possibilities of careers in government (which ironically they have been taught to distrust). Times are changing.  Young Republicans are changing.

However the election goes in November, the Republican party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, will not last much longer.  It will change dramatically in the next few years.  If it doesn’t change, it will cease to exist at all.  America needs both parties to be alive and well (with integrity)... at the same time.  The nation needs two parties for the serious dialogue that two parties make possible in government.  The Golden Age of Republicanism will not exist for many more years. It was tarnished from the start. A few years from now the nation will look back on the Tea Party phenomenon with embarrassment... But in this present election cycle, the country is in jeopardy.  Don Romney and Sancho Ryan would be a disaster for the country.  They seem not to know they are tilting at windmills.