On our way South for some summer on the beach, Adella and I passed a truck with this admonition painted on its back doors:  "Vote red in November, or be red in December."  We got the first "red" reference, but we had to think about the second one.  Embarrassed?  Communist?

We paused.  Is the owner of this truck still worried about communism?  Which candidate might be considered a communist?  What year is this?

The back doors of the truck made me think of a property owner in Woodbury, Connecticut, who sees fit to admonish the locals about the evils of the non-Republican world by painting slogans on a piece of plywood that he uses to decorate his front lawn.  Currently, the slogan, "Butterly, utterly, uttelry disappointing" with frownie faces assaults passersby on Main Street.  We don't know why he opposes the first selectman; there are no footnotes.

At a rest stop, I checked out Google News to find out that Paul Ryan would adjourn the house rather than tolerate a vote on gun control.  The vote, he said, was a publicity stunt.

Last I knew, Chris Murphy wanted to force a converation about the "everyday carnage" that results from easy access to guns. After all, we have had way to much "everyday carnage" since the massacre at Sandy Hook in  2012. 

Conversation about important issues is at the heart of the democratic process, so let's go. But no.  Republicans would rather pull down the shutters on democratic discourse and go home lest--what?

Come November, I will cheerfully vote the party line.  Then, I will drive to work, where I will do the hard job of convincing my students that their lives depend on participating in democratic discourse.

If you see things differently, please feel free to say so--but only after you have thought about the lives of the babies gunned down at Sandy Hook thanks to a gun-toting Republican mommy.