Thirty six years ago!

1976 was a very good year for me personally! I got married that year and our nations bicentennial seemed so alive with the freedom of new found love and experiences. It was an election year and I was, at that time, a Republican when you could still take some pride in that fact. Gerald R. Ford had taken over the presidency from the disgraced Richard M. Nixon and his quiet, dignified ways had set the country back on course from the nightmare that had been Watergate. This was the first real time that I realized that there could be a tomorrow after something horrible had happened. I have still not, almost fifty years later, ever really recovered from the Kennedy assassination and I probably never really ever will.

This nation has tilted and changed course so many times through the years of its existence and even through the last thirty six years since 1976 has come and gone. I have vivid memories of the fourth of July that year and all of the tall ships lying at anchor in Boston Harbor. I remember vividly the celebrations on the mall in Washington D.C. and the great sense of optimism that swept the nation and the world that summer. It was a time before Jimmy Carter and the hostage crisis and the great and, to me anyway, horrible Reagan revolution swept the country toward what it is today. I rejoiced in the Reagan election and thought that another national nightmare had ended on January twentieth of 1981 when he was inaugurated president of the United States. The hostages came home and it was, for me at that time, a true morning in America. Walter Cronkite, the face of the nation, reported on his CBS broadcast about the inauguration and those who had spent over a year in the clutches of those who had taken over Iran now being on their way home. When he said his so familiar “And that’s the way it is� I believed him. It was later in march of that same year that he once again said it for the last time, and it has not been the same since that day passed. I still recall Lyndon B. Johnson stating that if he had lost Walter Cronkite that he had lost the people and the war in Vietnam all at the same time.

The Reagan years went by very quickly and my first marriage ended during his tenure in the White House. I was single when I was in Washington and, in the summer of 1987 around the fourth of July that year I heard one of his patented speeches given. I didn’t know it at the time but I was changing as I voted in women to Kiwanis International on that trip. Although I was still a raging conservative, cracks were beginning to show in my armor on my long and tortuous journey to liberalism. Real cracks began to show during the tenure of George H.W. Bush when he continually did things that irritated my political psyche. I was passionately for him in the election of 1992 because I really didn’t like his democratic opponent. 1992 was the first time that I invaded the Democratic primary to vote for his opponent in the dimming hopes of keeping Bill Clinton out of the White House. It would not be the last time that I would vote Democrat, only the first.

I was a little more ambivalent by the year 2000 as I watched the presidential election unfold that year. Al
Gore seemed kind of strange and sort of distant to me and I knew so very little about George W. Bush that I voted that year more on my past ties than anything else. What George W. Bush did during those eight years of absolute horror tuned me into a Democrat for life as I began to readily see what the power of true evil in the office of the presidency could do to a nation and to the world as a whole. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was only part of the problem as he and his little cohort of what I can only describe and a true cult carried out policies and destruction on this nation that I still have trouble believing down to this very day. I have always had an affinity for the old Don McLean song “Bye Bye Miss American Pie� and I used to think that the jester in that song was Richard Nixon but, I am now very certain that it was George W. Bush. I saw him recently at a gathering to unveil his and his wife’s portraits at the White House and the expression on his face and the humor that he exhibited there made me more than certain that none of what he had done and the ramifications of any of it had sunk in on him in any possible way.

In November of 2008, I cast my vote for the first black president of the United States and my road from conservatism to where I now stand was pretty much complete. My parents might roll over in their graves if they knew what I have now become but, in view of their own so advanced views of race relations, I think that they might have been more than a little proud of me. My conservative brother cast his vote that year for John McCain and it was to be his last vote as he would pass away before the next presidential election rolled around. Many things die hard in those who hold great passion for what they believe, and, sometimes, it takes events that can be horrific to behold to shake people away from things that have been so carefully crafted to benefit the few to the exclusion of practically everyone else. The Reagan revolution is, I feel, to this day one of those craftations, and I, if I live long enough, still hold out the hope that it will finally, to use the words of speaker of the house John Boehner in describing the Affordable Care Act, be pulled out by its very roots. I do know this, the American pageant goes on and on and what I saw with my new wife back in our wedding year of 1976 will, with careful attention from the citizens of this land, continue to serve it well and faithfully for ages and ages to come. I studied the Tea Party in college and I have seen the new Tea Party of our present age and, in the end, they will all find their place in our history as long as there are hands left to write. Radicalism has its place, we suppose, but it will always be out on the fringes until something or someone propels it into the mainstream to flourish for a while until something else just as radical supersedes it in the long flow of history. I go, occasionally, up to Arlington National Cemetery and I look down and up and I see the true price paid for all that goes on. And, I go to the Vietnam Memorial and I see all of those names staring down at me. And, I go sometimes at night to the Lincoln Memorial and as I step out into the darkness I let my eyes adjust and I stare into the distance at that flame flickering on that hill back up at Arlington. I know little but I do know this, as long as that flame burns freedom burns on with it!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.