Damnit

This really hurts.

My love affair with Molly Ivins all began when I first moved to Fresno. I still considered myself politically conservative, seeing that my religious faith called for me to maintain the status quo on all things social, political and economic. However, something happened in the summer of 1996 as my job in really rough parts of the city began to alter my theology and politics. I began to see that I needed to "do this unto the least of these". And, I also began to truly grow up, and I made sense of my loved ones' relationships around me, I began to see that live, people and love were deeper and more complex than I was in college. I soon began stumbling across programming on KFCF, the sister station of KPFA and articles syndicated in the Fresno Bee written by Molly Ivins. Her acerbic wit and logic on issues regarding politics, political parties and two-facedness made me begin to see that the righteously indignant Republican Party that was attacking the then president had no ground of character to stand on. While I still cast a reluctant vote for Bob Dole in '96, I did so believing that I was voting for a candidate whose party did not want to see society as a whole progress. Articles like Ivins' continued to gain my attention as the 2000 campaign heated up and Molly's Texan character gave her full reason to believe that her attacks against the GOP candidate held great amounts of water. There weren't too many times I disagreed with her and I soon saw that part of political identity came out of Molly's columns. I'm indebted to her wit and insight, humor and profound words. If you haven't done so, you owe it to her memory and yourself to read some of her writings.