ADDICTIVE REPUBLICANS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/13/09)

While interning at Neuro-psychiatric Institute at UCLA's Medical School, I learned that people who've been addicted to narcotics stop maturing during the time of their addiction. If they are addicted from age 18 to 25, at 25, they will likely have the emotional and cognitive development of an 18 year old. It is as though they have been "out of it" for 7 years.

So it is with the Republicans, only it's been longer than 7 years. I count them going back to Herbert Hoover in 1932. That's 76 years, six years older than I am. I've moved along, often times grudgingly, but I got the idea that the times have changed. Of course, I wasn't addicted during those years to those noxious substances they seem to have been inhaling, snorting, drinking, and injecting.

I recall counseling a woman who heroically reclaimed sobriety at about 45 but kept behaving socially as though she were about 16. We spent many hours together on a speed course to maturity. In contrast, the Republicans are returning to their base, unaware that one cannot go home again because home is no longer there. That's one of the poignant lessons of maturity.

Not much can be done for them, other than prayer. Perhaps, their Fundamentalists colleagues can arrange a divine intervention, but I fear would come off more as a deus ex machina than a damascene conversion. They just don't want to catch up, preferring the addictive stupor of "easy speeches that comfort cruel men."