"My Root"

The other day I was watching this campy move “But I’m a cheerleader”, about a girl who’s parents send her home to help her get over being a homosexual. It was a completely tongue in cheek and made me chuckle. One of the things they had to discuss in therapy was their “root” the reason they became gay…examples included a girl seeing her mom get married in pants and another was because the girl was born in France. Anyway, I was moving pictures from my camera to my computer when I came across some that I took on the drive home from LV. And there it was “my root”, not for being gay (I’m only 46% gay), but for being a closet socialist. Mercury, Nevada…home of the “test site”. My parents are uber-republican, which means we don’t talk politics for fear that it will give them a coronary. But, I must admit that I do slip in jabs every once in a while, for instance one time when they were visiting my mom and I were at a book store and she mentioned she wanted a book by Dr. Laura, and I told her that I’d prefer not to have that kind of crap in my house because Dr. Laura was a bigot. Would I have really not let her have it in my house, no, but it felt good to say. I digress, so when I was a kid my parents used to take us to the test site with a church group (keep in mind I’m catholic) to protest nuclear testing. So, here’s a snippet of the massage they sent me as a child…nuclear testing “bad”… abortion “bad”…death penalty “good”. Really the nuclear testing was the only thing that had any impact…in 8th grade I was boycotting GE for building nuclear reactors and McDonald for cutting down forest for herding cattle…definitely moving down the path away from my parent’s republican spouting and toward many future socialist reading.


The road leading to the test site...the white building to the left is next to a chain link fence that when crossed got you arrested for traspassing. We'd have mass outside the fence and then the adults would hold hands and sing religious songs when crossing the fence together...my parents didn't participate in this activity.