…actually the King Street Art Festival in Alexandria, but today was his first time campaigning!
Excited and ready to go:
At our booth (he was a big hit):
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NRI Summit
31 JanThis past weekend the National Review Institute held a summit in Washington, DC addressing the future of conservatism. When we moved to the DC area I vowed to get involved in the local political scene and also take advantage of exciting events, so I was thrilled to be able to attend this three day conference. I am a HUGE fan of National Review–I read the online magazine daily and receive a few of their e-mail newsletters–so my expectations for the summit were pretty high. Well, after a devastating election this was like a balm for my battered spirit, and I came away refreshed and energized for the future.
The summit began on Friday at 5 and ended Sunday at 2, with back-to-back panels on everything from changing demographics to the morality of markets. There were also speakers, interviews, and receptions. My highlight was meeting my very favorite writer, Jay Nordlinger. Faithful readers will remember the letter I wrote to Jay back in October, which he published a good deal of on The Corner (NRO’s blog). When I introduced myself to him on Friday evening he remembered me and was incredibly gracious and interesting to talk to. He even suggested we take a picture together to send to my friend William, who is also a huge Jay fan and had written to him in response to my letter. I think that this picture, while terribly unflattering of me, accurately portrays how thrilled I was to meet Jay:
Another bright spot among many was meeting Jonah Goldberg, another of my favorite conservative thinkers. I told him I felt like a pre-teen girl at a Justin Bieber concert and he said that he described the summit to his wife as Comicon for political nerds. Ha! I think that’s about right.
The last NRI summit was in 2007 and I am *really* hoping that they don’t wait six years to host another one!
March for Life
28 JanLast Friday was the 2013 March for Life in Washington, DC. I had been looking forward to going for a long time, but after a week of illness in our house and a sudden, severe cold snap Ruby and I almost stayed home. At the last minute I decided to head down to the Mall and am so glad we did.
It was bitter cold but the turnout was tremendous (500,00+). There were throngs of young people in particular and the energy was palpable. Ruby had a bit of a breakdown so we didn’t stay for the end of the rally or the march itself, but I am so glad to have been there at all. Wandering among the crowd, I saw many disabled people and beautiful children with Down Syndrome, who are being aborted at a rate of approximately 90%. I had to wipe tears from my eyes many times as I read simple, homemade signs giving thanks for the gift of life. Next year I will take two precious babies with me to march for the millions who cannot.
Ruby was nice and snuggly warm bundled up in her stroller blanket:
I love GOProud:
These beautiful, happy people made me cry with their simple message of hope and redemption amidst despair:
The Day After the Day After
8 NovI had every intention of writing a post-election post yesterday but spent most of the day on a short trip to Richmond to meet up with my family. I had started getting sick (a cold) while watching the election returns, and by the time I got home yesterday I was in pretty bad shape. Rather than try to muddle through my feelings I decided to wait until today to jot down my thoughts. I’m glad I did–I think that the extra time gave me a little bit of clarity.
First let me say that I was shocked by the results. I realize that there was quite a bit of polling data that pointed to the actual outcome, but I did not think there was any way that Democratic turnout would be as high as it was in 2008. I was wrong. Hats off to President Obama’s team for their tremendous ground game.
Four years ago, this is how I felt when Barack Obama first won the presidency. A lot has happened in the four years hence: I got engaged, got married, bought a house, had a daughter, got out of the Navy, moved to Virginia from California, lost a baby. Also in those four years we have actually witnessed the presidency of the candidate of hope and change. I truly wish that I felt as optimistic today as I did in 2008.
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a healer, a uniter. It was easy to get swept up in his beautiful rhetoric and personal story. Today, not so much. At least not for me.
I have many, many thoughts about this election and why things turned out the way that they did. People who are much wiser and have better access to data will pick everything apart, from the primaries to campaign commercials to changing demographics. Political scientists will suggest fine-tuning this message or making a dramatic reversal on that issue. We’ll see what the future of the GOP has in store, but from where I sit I think that we may be fighting a losing battle.
I am saddened, really, by where I think our country is today. It appears that more citizens than not feel that the answers to our myriad problems lie in an ever-expanding federal government. It is a good and noble thing to want to help the poor in our society, and well-intentioned people used to be able to disagree on how best to accomplish this important task. Now it seems that if you do not believe that the answer is food stamps and 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and redistribution of wealth and “free” health care then you are selfish and greedy and only care about “the rich.” Never mind if these programs actually work or if they perpetuate a hopeless cycle of dependency.
It is also my belief that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party lost the “war on women” war of words. I live in Alexandria, Virginia, and was inundated with ads about how Romney wanted to take away women’s rights, which were never enumerated. I thought about what those rights could be and surmised that apparently women’s rights encompass the right to abort an unborn child at any stage of development for any reason, and the right to free birth control. We can argue about the merits of either of those “rights” but the message got through to the intended audience; women preferred Obama to Romney by a 10-point margin.
So my heart is a little heavier than it was four years ago. I worry a lot more–now it is not just me that I have to think about but the futures of my children and grandchildren. I do still hold out some hope, mostly because some of my dearest friends believe so differently from me. I don’t agree with their views but we are all sincere in our beliefs. Maybe they will be proven right and I will be proven wrong, or maybe the pendulum will swing back in a few years. In the meantime a Thomas Jefferson quote keeps repeating in my head, over and over again: Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…the course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
Four Years Ago
8 NovIn November 2008 I was serving with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. This is how I was feeling the day after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America.
November 5, 2008, COB Speicher, Iraq
On November 5th, 1992 I was 10 years old. The night before, William Jefferson Clinton had been elected the 42nd president of the United States. My 5th grade math teacher, Mrs. Leyton, wore a Clinton/Gore pin to school to show her support for the president-elect, and I told her something to the effect of “well I think that Bill Clinton is going to ruin this great nation with higher taxes.” We were instructed to write in our journals about our post-election feelings and I wrote that I was in mourning for our country.
Fast-forward 16 years and I am now a LTJG in the Navy, serving with the Army in Iraq. The polls on the east coast started closing at 3 am local time, so I woke up in the middle of the night, wrapped myself in a blanket to guard against the recent chill in the air, and watched the election returns on AFN.
The soldiers I work with took to calling me their “election headquarters” because I kept up so well with the polls throughout the seemingly interminable election, and I was always more than willing to share both the facts as I knew them and my endless predictions. Over the past few months my moods have vacillated depending on the plethora of polls. After the Republican National Convention I was flying high and nothing could get me down, but after the market started its freefall and McCain’s polling numbers followed I was increasingly agitated that the only thing I could do to stop Obama’s blue wave was to cast my Pennsylvania absentee ballot and hope for the best. An eternal optimist, I remained fiercely convinced that one of my personal heroes, Senator John McCain, could pull off another upset and land himself in the White House all the way up until I actually saw Senator Barack Obama’s supporters dancing through the streets of Chicago, and one of the men I admire most give a deeply gracious and moving concession speech. By the time our first African-American president delivered his acceptance speech I was already out the door on my way to a meeting, but I read the transcript later and was impressed by his words as well.
Being a political junkie, November 4th was like Christmas in autumn for me. As much as I wanted my candidate to win, I also love the political process. Watching the numbers come in, painting the once grey maps blue and red and proving the pundits either right or wrong gives me no small measure of satisfaction, and this year it was especially gratifying to see the tremendous voter turnout. I’ve grown up quite a bit since Clinton’s first victory, and I no longer wallow in misery at the thought of my candidate losing. Granted, I was disappointed and am concerned for the future of our country, but the same optimist in me who hoped for a McCain upset now prays that I will be proven wrong and that President Obama will govern with wisdom and strength. On January 20th he will become my commander in chief, and I will obey his lawful orders as I support and defend the Constitution. My candidate lost, but every time Americans participate in a free and fair election democracy wins. The increased interest in our legacy of government for the people and by the people is certainly something to be optimistic about, especially because the great honor of my life is to put on a uniform and defend that freedom every day.
Voting!
2 NovI will be working the polls on Tuesday so today I took advantage of Virginia’s in-person absentee voting. Ruby behaved beautifully and we were in and out in about ten minutes. Here we are outside the election office:
And here Ruby is with her Romney/Ryan button and “I voted” sticker:
This one was just too cute not to share:
Ruby Talks Politics
18 OctRuby was SO excited to receive her Romney onesie today she had to put it on right away.
This inspired her to share her thoughts on the election.
Link
Letter to Jay
5 OctLast Thursday one of my absolute favorite political writers, Jay Nordlinger of National Review, wrote a column in which he touched on women in combat. I decided to write him a letter about my experience as a female naval officer and Iraq war veteran. A few hours later I got a text from my friend William asking if that was me that Jay had quoted in The Corner (nationalreview.com’s blog). It turns out he did quote me, quite extensively. I was super excited and very honored.
Here is a link to his original article, and here is the relevant section:
I must say, I find it very hard to argue about women in combat. This is bad news, because I’m supposed to be an opinion journalist, whose business is persuasion, right? But either you find the idea of women in combat appalling or you don’t.
Many regard the issue as a matter of women’s rights, even civil rights. To them, a woman in combat is like a black citizen in a voting booth. Hurray, progress!
Other people think that women in combat represent some kind of civilizational breakdown: Our mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, aunts, and nieces in combat? What kind of monsters are we? It runs against nature, it cuts some kind of vital cord.
As I say, I find it hard to argue about women in combat. Either you feel its wrongness in your stomach or you don’t. I know a conservative intellectual who said, “The day they try to draft my daughters is the day I divorce my country and take to the hills.”
(The matter of individual choice — “Do you want to serve in the Army, miss? Would you like to serve in combat?” — comes up in this discussion too, of course.)
Here is my entire letter:
Dear Jay,
Loved your column today, as always. I would like to comment briefly on women in combat, if you would be so kind as to indulge me.
I graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the great class of 2005. In plebe (freshman) Western Civilization we discussed women in combat. I was the only girl in the class (a common occurrence) and the professor put me on the spot. I hadn’t given it much thought but rather lamely defended the idea. I don’t remember my exact argument, but I do remember one of my classmates, who was also in my company and a close friend, saying that he was against the idea. As a chivalrous southerner, he just could not fathom the thought of my suffering at the hands of the enemy, and would go to extraordinary measures to protect me.
Fast-forward almost seven years. I am now the navigator on a guided missile cruiser, and my ship gets tasked with providing an officer to spend nine months in Iraq augmenting the Army as an electronic warfare officer. Immediately I volunteer because I feel compelled–called, really–to go. Nobody else volunteers. Not one of the men. They are all extremely happy to let a girl go in their place.
I get stationed at COB Speicher in Tikrit with the 101st Airborne. The closest I ever come to combat is when the convoy I am traveling with is targeted by a very small IED. No one is hurt and we just keep rolling along through the Iraqi countryside. I serve my time (July 2008-April 2009, so we may have overlapped), come home safely, get married, and have a baby girl of my own.
Surprisingly this is one political issue that I just do not feel passionately about, one way or the other. In theory I contend that women being mangled, killed, or taken prisoner in combat is particularly terrible, not because our lives are worth any more than those of our make counterparts, but because it goes against our most primal instincts as human beings. However, in practice, I think that it is becoming a necessity. Women are still barred from infantry or special warfare, but we do operate with those units as support personnel, and in many other capacities that put us in harm’s way, and have for years.
Here is the rub: who else will do it? In general, men of my generation are not chivalrous and many are too lazy to work, let alone serve in the military. Most simply do not care who defends their right to live in their parents’ basement and play video games all day. My chivalrous southern classmate is far and away the exception rather than the rule. Our society has changed so quickly in such a short time that those basic primal instincts are being drummed out with political correctness and this issue is becoming obsolete.
This was less brief than I had intended, but your writing always inspires me to think more deeply, and for that I thank you.
Cheers,
Sarah Shellock
This is the link to his blog post. Here is what he said specifically about my letter:
We could talk about this all day, but I’d like to cite one more letter, from an American veteran, a woman, who served in Iraq. It’s a fascinating letter. I’ll give you some of the beginning and some of the end. She says,
“I graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the great class of 2005. In plebe (freshman) Western Civilization we discussed women in combat. I was the only girl in the class (a common occurrence) and the professor put me on the spot. I hadn’t given it much thought but rather lamely defended the idea. I don’t remember my exact argument, but I do remember one of my classmates, who was also in my company and a close friend, saying that he was against the idea. As a chivalrous southerner, he just could not fathom the thought of my suffering at the hands of the enemy, and would go to extraordinary measures to protect me.”
By the way, don’t you love that she used the word “girl”? Anyway, after graduation, she went to Iraq. And she discovered some things there. One of those discoveries was that the men were perfectly happy to have the women do dangerous work, including in their stead. At the end of her letter, she writes,
“Here’s the rub: Who else will do it? In general, men of my generation are not chivalrous and many are too lazy to work, let alone serve in the military. Most simply do not care who defends their right to live in their parents’ basement and play video games all day. My chivalrous southern classmate is far and away the exception rather than the rule. Our society has changed so quickly that those primal instincts are being drummed out with political correctness and this issue [women in combat] is becoming obsolete.”
Hard to talk about, women in combat, at least in my experience. Either you feel it in your stomach — or you don’t.
So there it is: my brief moment of conservative fame!
Backyard Take 2
11 AugAll of Matty’s hard work laying sod in our little backyard a few months ago turned out to be in vain. The sod didn’t quite take root and we ended up with dead grass. Today Matty decided to try a new approach–he ripped up the sod and spread out rubber mulch. The yard looks so much better and the mulch will be a nice cushiony place for Ruby if she happens to take a tumble.
Here is Ruby in the yard mid-project:
A lovely new home for Ruby’s “wee!”
This afternoon we all went to the Irish Festival in Old Town, where I volunteered at the Republican booth. Of course Ruby was a huge hit in her cute clover dress.
Loudmouth Mommy 