A Minority of One
Ronald Reagan was the first president whose term of office I remember. My parents didn’t like him, so I didn’t like him either. John Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life is one of my earliest memories – I was barely two years old, and until I was several years older I was unable to understand why my mother was crying for a president she didn’t like and hadn’t voted for. After all, if the president dies, you get a new president!
Not liking Reagan marked my family as different from most other families in our small Louisiana town, and not in a good way. It isolated us, so much so that as a child, with my confidence and my sense of who I was less than fully formed, I found it easy to fall into the trap of wondering if it was really okay to hold a political opinion different from the prevailing norm. I grew up as part of a political minority, but outside my home I rarely felt that I was part of anything. Among my schoolmates and friends, I was completely alone.
The presidential election of 1984 was the first in which I was aware enough to know what was going on. My second grade class held a mock election. We were told about it a day or two ahead of time so that we could talk with our classmates about who we were voting for and why. I supported Mondale, naturally, because my parents did. But then some miniature Karl Rove among us spread the rumor that a classmate’s Evil Liberal Democrat parents had tried to rig the election by threatening to take all her toys away if she voted for Reagan. All of us were incensed when we heard that – it was a grave offense against our sense of fair play. And so Reagan carried my second grade class, thirty-something votes to one. No, the dissenting vote was not mine. I have always regretted it.