I’ve heard enough! I am old enough now to have lived through some pretty hot Presidential contests but I have never seen anything like the bitch-slap-fest taking place in full view of the American public as what we are now subjected to on a daily basis.
My first memories go back all the way to the 1964 Johnson/ Goldwater contest. I believe at age nine, the rumors among my group were that if Goldwater was elected, we’d have to go to school on Saturdays! Horrors! As any self-respecting elementary school pupil would do, I supported Lyndon Johnson.
Fast forward to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, I can remember watching TV at my Grandma Gray’s house (she, too was a rebel Democrat in our family) and seeing Julian Bond being barred entry. At thirteen, I thought he was really cute. I couldn’t quite put myself behind someone with a funny name like Hubert Horatio Humphrey, so I became a Nixon supporter. (Silly me!)
By the 1972 Presidential race, I was sixteen and brimming with idealism. For the previous two years I’d been a member of a special group at my high school, the Multi-District Institute for Political Eduction. During that time I learned quite a bit about how campaigns run, and had done my share of door to door canvassing and stuffing of envelopes. On election night, I remember all too well standing at our local Democratic office, watching the returns and seeing the map turn all red except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. It was a very sad night.
I remember another very sad night, two years later when I watched Richard Nixon resign. History was made when a man who had never been elected by the general public stepped up to the Commander-in-Chief position.
By the next Presidential election year, 1976, I was in college. My days of political activity had fallen by the wayside due to some past unpleasantness and I had no real knowledge about which candidate stood for what. Pretty sad given the fact this was the first Presidential election I was eligible to vote in. But I was living in New Jersey and I guess you could say my life was centered around “New York City values”. Because of this, I wasn’t overly fond of the idea of a peanut farmer from Georgia becoming president. So I voted Republican.
Over the next several years, my life was focused on my family. The daily routine of rearing children, mostly single-handedly while Dave was deployed, kept me more focused on PTA agendas than those of the government. Presidential elections came and went, each with its specific brand of rhetoric, scandals, accusations and rebuttals. It wasn’t until my children were out of the house and I had time to really consider the impact of elections from an adult perspective that I became active again.
This time, instead of working for the candidates, I became an Election Official. I was a poll worker for two years and then a Precinct Chief for another two until we moved. In that time I had the incredible opportunity to work the 2008 Presidential Election.
After spending more than one long day at the polls where less than 100 voters came to exercise their right and responsibility, on this special day, when I arrived at the polling place at 4:30 AM, there was already a line at the door and we didn’t open until 6:00.
Most folks arrived before noon, so for a while the lines were long. I was amazed by the number of people, especially middle-aged Afro-American men, for whom this was the first time they had even bothered to vote. Many had just registered earlier that year. The prospect of electing a black man to the highest office was a great motivation to these people, and rightly so. It was a time of hope that change would be right around the corner.
Well, change may not have been right around the corner, and certainly not the type of change that was expected, but we certainly are experiencing a change in the landscape of American political campaigning that I personally am hoping gets nipped in the bud!
I am appalled by the crude language and gutter sniping that is much more reminiscent of the verbal sparing before a WWF match than an election of what some consider to be the “Leader of the Free World”. At this point, why on earth the free world would allow the US to even say that is a mystery.
I am baffled that in a county where children are protected from every threatening aspect of life from car riding to clothing, there isn’t an outcry among the parents of young children in this county. I remember the horror I felt one night when the kids were little while we were eating pizza in front of the TV, that the nightly news did a report about pubic hair on a Coke can during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Compared to what’s being bantered around these days, that was nothing!
I am saddened by the attacks on immigrants to this country. Given the current rhetoric, we should probably at least remove the poem by Emma Lazarus from the Statue of Liberty. Or perhaps add an addendum like “Give us you tired, your poor…” “as long as you are self-sufficient, are fluent in English and are Christian or Jewish.” There is no one living in this country today who can say their family has always lived here, including the native Americans.
I am outraged that the media continually highlights the most horrendous of statements thereby perpetuating them into the national lexicon – I still am aghast by the continued “dick” jokes and the fact that instead of shining a light on the impropriety, they simply make some folks think these candidates are “one of us.”
Frankly, I can’t think of any “one of us” I’d like to see as President of the United States. Clearly the position should be held by a person who is able to rise above, not push others down. And anyone who believes that the biggest bag of wind in this race is just “one of us” because he has the oratory presence and vocabulary of a dock worker, they are sadly mistaken. Just like the Wizard of Oz, there is a very little man, hands and all, standing behind the curtain, pulling strings to produce a great deal of sound and fury and to quote Shakespeare, “Signifying nothing.”
Just sayin’
ps.
After writing this, I realized that my first awareness of a President was of John Kennedy. I was just a little girl when he was killed, but the memories of watching his funeral procession on our black and white TV screen are strong, no doubt reinforced by seeing them replayed over and over again through the years. I suppose those memories play a big part in my image of a President and just like there has never been a man born who can measure up to my Daddy, the same holds true for presidents.
This morning I treated myself to something I haven’t done in so many years that I can’t even remember; I lazed in my bed for over an hour just dozing in and out and thinking. It was amazing!
One of the first nature sounds I noticed when we moved back to the mainland from Hawai’i was the caw of crows. It was in mid-October, just as it is now and the cawing seemed sharper against the changing leaves. Until then, I’d never really noticed crows around me before, although I’m sure they were. Probably, it was the lack of the familiar sounds of the mid-atlantic section of the country that I’d experienced in my three years in the Pacific that made them sound so much more memorable than most would find them to be.
One of the first books I remember my mother reading to me as a child was A.A. Milne’s 
Izzie and I are currently practicing a catch and release hunting protocol; she catches birds and brings them into the house and I carefully gather them up and set them free. It’s not an arrangement that I fully endorse, but I am happy to do my part in getting the birds back out-of-doors where they belong.