back when we were all the same

Back when; when I was a child, when my parents were young, when my neighborhood had children in every house but all the dogs were yard dogs and no one liked cats, we were all the same. 

We lived in a place where mothers stayed home and cleaned house and reared (never raised--you raise sheep or cows or potatoes) children and watched daytime soap operas.  Fathers came home every evening to a clean house with a homemade meal on the table, maybe a beer or a martini first and afterward, wife did the dishes while hubby watched TV and kids prepared for bed.

We all went on a 2 week vacation every year.  Had a car for the family to make that trip and the weekly shopping trip and the kids either walked to school or rode the bus.  Every house had a metal swingset in the backyard and a sandbox.  The front yard had flowerbeds and a birdbath.  And everyone was at church on Sunday morning.

It was great!

But it was never real.

It's as if we averaged all those people in the neighborhood and then pretended it was the truth, the reality.  It was our shared fiction.

And we never looked outside the neighborhood.  And the Whole World was the United States.  Everyplace else was just a story, a fictional story, no more real than the stories about cave men or the stories about the crusades or vampires.  None of that existed in our world except through TV.  Which was only slightly more real than a good story book--or a bad story book.

When I was 7, the TV news told us some man that was a communist had shot our president--we all cried; our whole second grade class--and the buses took us home early, and we were off the next day or week or some strange length of time and watched his riderless horse walk down the street while wondering why he had a horse instead of a car--and cried again--poor lonely horse.  And we vowed to never be communists that shoot presidents.

When the TV news showed race riots--suddenly these people of another race were in our country  that had never been there before and  they were trying to kill people for no reason.  We had no people of other races in our world until then--all our books showed that--all our tv shows showed that.  We were concerned.  We were scared.  Would those people of other races come to our neighborhoods and kill us, too?

When the TV showed riots on college campuses about the Vietnam war, we were confused.  Our soldiers were heroes, saving people from communism, protecting us all from---something.

When the TV told us Martin Luther King was shot, we didn't know what to think.  Our parents didn't like him.  They wanted him to be quiet.  They wanted him to go away--back to Africa or somewhere, but now they were even more worried about race riots.  The fathers got their old and unused guns out and cleaned them and bought ammo.

When the TV news said the dead president's little brother, who also wanted to be president, had been shot, our families were a little shocked but not actually sad.  "That family is cursed," they said. But their pick for president was fine, so our world was fine.  Yea President Nixon!

When the TV news told us about Watergate, our fine president was in trouble.  Something to do with a hotel.  That was in his second term.  In his first term, he focused on ending the Vietnam War--so that ended the war protests, and then focused on rescuing the environment from pollution and improving race relations.  He was a Republican--apparently pollution was real to republicans back then.  He also worked on ending the cold-war  which was something none of us really understood-but how could you not hate communists--they were not like us and they were bad and evil.

The TV said he resigned rather than be impeached for supposedly paying a burglar $114,000 to bug the Democratic National Committee in order to win re-election.  They weren't going to impeach him for that, but rather for hindering the investigation.  I forget what they called that.  His Vice-president had already resigned before that for income tax violations and taking bribes, so, before President Nixon resigned, he had picked Gerald Ford to be the replacement for the vice-president, therefore also becoming the next president.  I don't think that had ever happened before.

President Ford was the last President of my childhood.  He was not reelected.  I remember him tripping and playing golf but not much else.  I don't know if that made him a bad president or a great president.

I got to vote in the next election due to the ratification of the 26th Amendment.  My parents and I squabbled about it a bit--they thought 18 year olds were too young to vote, that 21 year olds were also to young to vote.  I sided with the idea that if you could fight and die in a war you were old enough to vote and drink.  Hopefully in that order.  (they still don't get to drink around here)

I think I voted for Ford.  I was still thinking that religion and politics were genetic or at least hereditary.  It was not an informed vote, but my parents approved.

Jimmy Carter won.  He was a farmer, but since he raised peanuts and not cattle and wheat, or pigs and tobacco, my family was not impressed.  My future spouse loved him though.  Regularly referred to him as the greatest president since Lincoln.  Looking back, it was probably the truest thing he ever said.

Then we had Reagan.  I loved "Death Valley Days", my parents loved "Death Valley Days",  If he wasn't IKE, and they really liked IKE, he was good enough.  When he left office, I'd been a nurse long enough to know that he had a problem long before his presidency ended. (seeing we had no system to protect us from someone that is no longer fully cognizant leading the country was an eye-opener.)

My mother, who had been a registered democrat since age 21 changed to republican that year at the same time I changed to democrat.  I would have registered independent, but then couldn't have voted in the primaries.

Then came Bush, then Clinton, then Bush again, each one disappointing in different ways. I voted for 3rd party candidates or sat it out each of those 6 elections.  I was busy.  I had no idea what they were doing.  Looking back on history form this time--I REEEAAALLLY had no idea what was going on.

Then Obama ran.  The final Bush was so grammatically embarrassing and had thrown us into that stupid Iraq war and I started paying attention again, more, really paying attention.

I did not love everything Obama did.
I did not hate everything Obama did.

Reality is, in 8 years, neither of his daughters made the news for drunkeness,  or went to rehab, or got arrested.  There were not stories about him starting a war to pay back the ruler that messed with his father.  He did not change the judicial system from directly related to the population to logarithmically related to the population, and he did not send our troups to the middle east for oil. He gave us healthcare--not the universal healthcare I wanted, but closer than anyone since 1880's had done.  And he made all those people that had always been here--that I thought didn't exist when I was 7--very happy. He made them real, made them matter, gave them hope.  He gave a lot of other people hope also.

Obama was a very moderate democrat and was demonized by soooo many as if he was some left wing crazy.

I was a Bernie supporter last election.  He wasn't left enough but the closest I'd ever seen at the national level.  A part of me thinks, if all the folks still thinking that everyone is the same in their world would wake up, things would have gone differently.

Now, NOW we have a man that sees himself as another Ronald Reagan.  Some one should explain the difference between the magic of the silver screen and the TV version of the national enquirer--reality TV.

I voted.  Not for our current president.  And I doubt anyone will ever refer to him as the greatest president since Lincoln. 

I must admit, if he must be compared, it would be to Andrew Jackson.

Back when Andrew Jackson was keeping slavery alive and profiting from that and political power--we weren't all the same either.

Be different, and be aware that different is not wrong or bad or in any way negative.

And, don't get so busy you lose track of what is going on around you.

Sometimes you wake up in an alternate reality.