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What happens when your loyalty to a party is in direct conflict with the values that first inspired you to join it? Robert Jennings goes through the Republican Party's abandonment of its founding principles and links that to racism, the concentration of wealth and political obstruction as the key problems facing the country today. He calls for a return to the ideals of equal citizenship, democratic accountability and the urgent need to confront the climate crisis.
"Changing Pins" by Gloria Travers and the North Street Band takes that argument right into a farmhouse kitchen. A daughter who votes Democrat watches her lifelong Republican father swap his elephant pin for an American flag. He's not joining her party. He's choosing his conscience, his neighbours and his granddaughter's future over party allegiance.
Their quiet reconciliation is the article's invitation: we can disagree and yet still be bound to one another. It's the father making a hard decision and the daughter's loving response that underpins the song's question of what we are prepared to alter in order to keep the most important things.
Changin' Pins
Verse 1
Daddy wore that elephant to church on Sunday morn,
On the jacket Mama bought him before I was born.
He taught me, “Keep your word, girl, help your neighbor through.”
I grew up voting different, on the things I learned from you.
We quit talking politics somewhere along the way,
Passed the bread at supper, careful what we’d say.
Then I found him by the window, an old pin in his hand,
And a little folded flag one he was turning toward the lamp.
Chorus
Same old shirt, a different kind of pride,
He laid that little elephant aside.
“I gave ’em my vote, not the keys to my soul.
Been quiet too long about things I know.”
He wasn’t turning blue, wasn’t asking me to win,
Just finding his way home, changing pins.
Verse 2
He said, “I ain’t becoming a Democrat like you,
And don’t think we’re agreeing on everything you do.
But that flag belongs to everyone, not folks who vote like me,
And I can’t keep making peace with things I hate to see.
I know the men they’re hauling off; I’ve worked beside those men.
I’ve watched the creek come through this house, then come through again.
They keep telling me who’s dangerous, who I ought to blame,
But the fellows taking everything still have the same last names.”
Chorus
Same old shirt, a different kind of pride,
He laid that little elephant aside.
“I gave ’em my vote, not the keys to my soul.
Been quiet too long about things I know.”
He wasn’t turning blue, wasn’t asking me to win,
Just finding his way home, changing pins.
Verse 3
I thought about our arguments, the drives home fighting tears,
How we’d both said things at Christmas that stayed with us for years.
I could’ve named the reasons, could’ve counted every wrong;
Instead I pulled a chair up, and let him talk till dawn.
He said, “Your little girl deserves a world where she can grow.
I can’t look her in the eyes and say I didn’t know.”
Then he held that flag against his shirt, his fingers trembling some.
“Here, Daddy, let me help you.” And he handed me the pin.
Bridge
“You didn’t learn your heart from strangers;
You got some things from me.”
I laughed and cried together.
“Daddy, that’s what made it hard to see.
I wasn’t waiting for you to join my side;
I just missed standing next to you.”
He put his hand around my shoulder.
“I reckon I missed that too.”
Final Chorus
Same old shirt, a different kind of pride,
That little flag above his heart tonight.
“I gave ’em my vote, not the keys to my soul.
Some things you change to keep from letting go.”
He wasn’t turning blue, wasn’t asking me to win,
Just coming back to what he’d always been.
Still my stubborn daddy, with that same familiar grin—
An American, changing pins.
