We COKONOUGHER Hardheads !: Viola Cokonougher was a Democrat !

My mother Viola Cokonougher Cassidy was a solid Democrat. Early this year, when her illness had made her physically helpless and near the end of her life, she and I discussed politics for the last time. She wanted to vote one last time before she died, so I arranged for her to vote absentee in the primaries. Unfortunately, she deteriorated to the point that she never got to exercise that vote. I asked her who she wanted to vote for, and she replied, "Well I ain't voting for no damned Republican! That's for sure!"

Mom had told me and many others throughout the years her opinion of Republicans, "Poor people don't never have nothin' when Republicans are in office!"
I told mom that some of her grandchildren were Republicans, and asked her what she thought of that. She gritted her teeth, pulled her facial muscles up in a grimace, and made a shivering, raspberry sound of disapproval with her mouth. "They're only Republicans because their husbands make 'em that way!", she said. "I wouldn't tell them this because I can't take care of myself, but I'm ashamed of them. They don't have no common sense."

Mom died before she got to see who the Democrat and Republican party nominees were, but I know she would not have been happy with the Republican nominee, or the present president-elect. She thought that he was scum. She believed that you vote for someone that is the closest to someone like yourself. If you vote for a bigot and a racist, that means you either already are, or are signing on to be a bigot and a racist yourself. If you vote for a sexual molester or rapist of women, you are saying that you approve of such things and have no right to complain when they happen to you or your loved ones. If you vote for someone who wants to take away the God given rights of others to live in peace and practice their religion in peace, even if its not Christian, then you are saying you are a bigot and xenophobe too, and you will have no right to complain when your president gets around to taking your own rights away. If you vote for someone who can't understand why its not wise to use nuclear weapons, and give them to more countries, then you agree to suicide, and you can't complain when the radiation of the inevitable nuclear war circles the globe in the atmosphere and comes back to kill you too.

I am writing this because I want future generations of mom's descendants, if the country and the world survives, to know how Mom truly felt. She was a solid Democrat who was disappointed and ashamed of the beliefs and political views of her few Republican descendants, even though she still loved them all. I want them to know that mom was better than the people who voted for the hateful and oppressive nation that Americans showed ourselves to be in this last election. Mom especially hated the scum of any political party like Donald Trump. She hid her true feelings and disapproval from her Republican family members because she had no choice, especially after she got too old and sick to live alone and take care of herself, but she was not happy to do so.