August 26, 2003
Santa Cruz tonight.
Santa Cruz is not a haven for your average radical Right Republican, to put it faintly. The city is a "nuclear free zone" by ordinance, had the first public library to deliberately obstruct bits of the so-called "USA PATRIOT" Act and in general has been a wretched hive of lefties and liberals. Along with hippies, treehuggers, granola-eaters and others of the more left-of-center persuasion.
So it will come as no surprise to anyone that tonight, at some kind of street festival downtown, I saw both a booth of supporters of Howard Dean and an older, white-haired man handing out leaflets and declaiming that we need to hand Iraq over to the United Nations and get out of there. I smiled at the Dean booth and told the older man that he had my vote, for what it was worth.
It feels very strange to be surrounded by a bunch of liberals, even if they are tree-hugging leaf-eaters. (Hey, some of my best friends are tree-hugging leaf-eaters!) I'm so accustomed to having to fight the lack of awareness or the sheer idiocy of the people I run into, I feel almost uncomfortable among these people.
Hmmm.