Left-wing actress Susan Sarandon is 67 and on the cover of the new edition of AARP Magazine. We learn that while her mom is a staunch Republican, her siblings “run the gamut” in their politics.
"I have come to believe firmly in nature," Sarandon says. "We had the same parents, but everyone's very different." The liberal magazine reports “She cannot pinpoint the reason for her social consciousness.” As a girl, she was redistributing the wealth with dolls:
She tried to find hers, but incongruity seemed all around her. "I was in trouble from the very beginning in school, not because I was a rebel but because I asked what were deemed to be inappropriate questions," Sarandon says.
I remember in third grade being told that the only people who were really married were those married in the Catholic Church. I said, 'Then, how were Joseph and Mary married, because Jesus didn't create the church till later?' Original sin didn't make any sense to me. Limbo didn't make any sense. And, as I got older, a wrathful God didn't make any sense, or a God that would condemn someone to hell for their sexual orientation."
Sarandon broke up with longtime main-squeeze Tim Robbins in 2009 and now dates a man 31 years younger than she is (which she confirms to AARP). She and Robbins never married, but they were so politically annoying that the producer of the Oscars said they wouldn't be invited back after a left-wing jeremiad about Haitians at the 1993 awards ceremony.
Still, in 1963, at age 17, Sarandon enrolled at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and there she participated in protests against segregation in the South, and the Vietnam War. "It was a time when the issues seemed so clear," she says. At the university, she was drawn to drama because it was another way of tapping into the compassion she had for others. "It does something wonderful for your soul to walk in another person's moccasins," she says.
Liberals always become artists to demonstrate very publicly the "compassion they have for others." While married to actor Chris Sarandon in New York in the 1970s -- whom she later divorced because "It was about my choosing myself" -- she became an activist:
She also got increasingly involved in social causes. "I didn't see myself as a flamethrower or a convention breaker," Sarandon reflects. "I felt as if I was just Zelig in that I was a baby boomer, and I held on to some of the things that were going on then that some people lost as they became landed gentry. I certainly wasn't more moral. I tried to do what my core said was right for me."
Oh, the poor “landed gentry” get all bourgeois in the suburbs, while Sarandon stays in the city to keep her “progressive” axe sharpened. AARP didn't ask how she was handling her millions in wealth in her golden years.
The last part worth quoting was the notion that Sarandon “eschews smoking, except for marijuana. ‘I would much rather my kids smoke weed than drink, except that it's illegal,’ she begins, launching into a discourse about cartels, victimless crimes and mandatory minimum drug laws that crowd our prisons.”
