Encounters of the Boomer kind

The other day I had the privilege of spending a few days with Actual Howard Voters™ (AHV). You know, they really are differently-programmed. Really truly. Things that I and MrB think are undeniable truisms to them are actually, well, debatable. And I'm not even talking contentious issues such as Hicks and Iraq, these are things that, as Christians, we should be agreeing on... yet don't.

The weird thing is:

MrB's parents are Christians, both from working-class backgrounds, but now both solidly middle-class. You don't get much more bourgeois than the Shire! They ran a Small Business, and have backgrounds in nursing and banking. Your average everyday BabyBoomer in fact.

My parents are not Christians, both from working-class backgrounds, but both now solidly middle-class. And yes, they also live in the Shire. They run a Small Business - also your average Baby Boomers.

And yet, politically, MrB and I have so much more in common with my parents, not his. Very weird.

They are so similar in many ways, and yet so vastly different in terms of their political views. My parents are avowedly left-wing on most social issues, proud of their trade union heritage, yet not so narrow-minded that they're not prepared to see positives in some more right-wing policies. They were always supporters of the GST for instance... MrB's parents?

Well.

Back to the AHV™s... we didn't even discuss Hicks, because there's seriously no point. But we did discuss Iraq - and it's the only thing that they disagree with Howard over. The only thing. And it's only because we haven't won yet.

We threw at them:

• WorkChoices - they say it's all good because employers are the salt of the earth and need a break because these rascally employees just rort the system.
• Detention Centres - (in particular the recent story about the Sri Lankans being sent directly back to Sri Lanka) - they say it's all good because there were thousands and thousands of 'asylum seekers' - hordes in fact - coming over in boats to rort our system... [My question - What would Jesus Do? He said to take in the strangers... His reply - Render unto Caesar. At this point I exploded (and I had been very very good and had bitten my tongue on so many occasions) Right. So using that logic Jesus would have done nothing about the Holocaust and the gas chambers, because y'know Hitler said it was OK????? And you really don't need to know what his reply was.]
• Notable Christians taking the Government to task over the serious slide in social welfare over the last 12 years - they say they're not really evangelicals so it doesn't matter what they say... and besides they're all out to rort the system.

My all-time fave quote of the weekend, from MrsB Sr, was: I don't think Howard's a Christian. But he does listen to his wife a lot, really respects her... and she's a lovely Christian lady. Fred Nile says so.

Hmmm. Quite so. [How precisely does one respond to that?]

But the biggest thing, the massivest conspiracy theory that I'm surprised I hadn't heard on the interwebs yet, but seems to be the only way these conservatives can actually cope with the web of lies we've been told over Iraq is this:

The reason we haven't found the WMDs is because they were smuggled out of the country into Iran or Syria (doesn't matter which) during the invasion. But they were definitely there, and they definitely very very nasty and scary otherwise there wouldn't have been such an unseemly rush to go to war. Because there's no way that Tony Blair would have supported the invasion without concrete evidence of Saddam's evilness. And he's Labor, so you know we (MrB & I) have to believe him...It's just unfortunate that the haven't found the damn tricksy things. But they were most certainly there. Because they'd never lie to us.

The nasty scary thing is: they believe it. Whole-heartedly.


Updated to hopefully make more sense. In brief: MrB & I are Bleeding Heart, Latte-sippers etc. The object of much derision and scorn by his parents. Who I really do love very much. As long as politics aren't discussed. Because then I struggle to be tactful. Which, as anyone who knows me IRL would know, is a struggle indeed.