I spend a lot of time engaging strangers to the end of getting them to the polls, and hopefully voting for the candidate of my choice. But this was different. In fact, this is the first time in my life that a Republican reached out to me about something like this.

A few days ago, I received a message from someone that I took a course with about 20 years ago. We hadn’t really kept up, but we “see” each other occasionally on Facebook. He said he knew I knew a lot about voter registration, and wanted to know if I knew anything about politics. His issue involved a murdered 7 year old girl, and potential legislation that could protect other kids in the same situation.

If you know me at all, you know I’m all in on something like this.

We were on the phone, and I was listening to everything he was saying. And because I couldn’t help myself, I asked him if he was planning on voting for Trump. Again. And here’s the thing: while I would do anything to save the life of a child, if he would have said “yes”, I would have felt so differently. I still would have helped because it takes a village, but happily he is not only NOT in for a repeat of 2016, but he had questions about the upcoming judicial elections. He said that knowing someone whose child was murdered, and listening to what had happened, made him realize that WHO the judges are really does matter. It’s not, he told me, just a matter of voting the party in which he was registered, but the person.

And that got me thinking about Republicans and morality. I’ve been watching the Kurdish genocide unfold over the past week, and I have no words that rise to the level of my horror and fear about the whole situation. I understand what is going on with Trump, and you know I must be taking this BEYOND seriously because I’ve dispensed with the multitudes of nicknames. He is cornered, and it’s all over for him. For now, he’s got a hold on the elected Republicans, but citizen anger from his base is rising. In the recent Fox poll, 31% of Evangelicals support the impeachment inquiry, and that was before the photos came out of Kurds being shot, and ISIS leaders leaving the prisons. Evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson,  Franklin Graham, and Mike Evans, to name a few, have come out against Trump on this issue. And globally, it’s not just the Europeans who are up in arms, both Bibi Netenyahu AND the Arab League condemned Erdogan. What Trump did was so bad, that the only two people in the world who are okay with it are Assad and Putin.

Trump was rolled by Erdogan because he’s thinking less clearly than usual. His position is this: I don’t want the House to impeach me, and the more people hear about it, the more they are in favor of the inquiry. I need to do something to distract them. An then Erdogan called, and the opportunity presented itself. Remember, they say this was a private call outside of regular hours. And thus, in basic terms, Trump decided that the genocide was a good idea.

And that decision was made prior to the arrest of Rudy’s co-conspirators, and the publicizing of the investigation directly into Rudy’s activities. And remember, folks, Parnas and Fruman were arrested walking down the jetway at Dulles by people waiting for them. How did that happen? The wires indicated when they were going to Dulles, and which flight they were taking. Thus, the cops were waiting for them. That wasn’t a one-off situation, there are lots of tapes, and lots of evidence. If Trump didn’t know this, he certainly found out on Saturday when he had lunch with Rudy.

And in my heart, I worry. If Trump will go with genocide (and he’s still defending it) and the possibility of American troops being killed by the Turks before they do a repeat of Saigon in ’75, imagine what he’ll do when the Supremes refuse to hear the final appeal on his tax returns and public opinion has risen to 75% pro-impeachment inquiry.

Which is a long circle back to my Republican friend. In general, against my higher nature, I hate the current Republicans. I hate what they stand for, I hate their hypocrisy, I hate that they still support the current regime. But I am starting to see the kind of cracks that may well lead back to the OLD Republican Party — one with which we could work on various initiatives, horse trade to a joint end, the way politics used to work.

I’m hoping that we can get some Republicans back to sanity. The ones who like the idea of fiscal responsibility (which, let’s be honest, is what the GOP says it wants to do, but what the Democrats ACTUALLY do) and are agnostic on most social issues….but for whom babies in cages, genocide, and the raping of the earth are all bridges too far.

I would have ended this piece with the sentence above, except I checked my email. I had sent my friend an email explaining the Reps and Senators with whom I’d spoken over the weekend, what we could do to move the bill forward, and made the offer that I would be happy to meet with him, and the family of the murdered girl (her ninth birthday would have been this week) and help them organize. I recommended Starbucks. He said that Starbucks was noisy, but there were business offices we could use to meet. And there it is: the Republican response of working quietly, in secret, versus the Democratic way of engaging more people. Face it, a meeting at Starbucks, or a bar, means that we can educate everyone at the nearby tables and get them to join in. So many Republicans, so much work.