Me and My Vote - i

In November of 1964, I was firmly under wing of my dad's politics. I don't remember Mom talking much politics. I don't know that she had a view of the senior senator from Arizona, but she was conservative Republican in the same way she was Christian Reformed. It was somewhere aboard her DNA. I know my dad appreciated the most famous line from that summer's Republican convention--how did that go again? "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Dad liked Goldwater. I liked Goldwater. While Dad didn't attend John Birch Society meetings, he was certainly of that stamp.

I don't remember feeling the sting of the 1964 Presidential wipeout, and the membership card up above makes clear that remained at least somewhat thoughtfully Republican. Still, what's evident from the note sitting here on my scanner is that I never sent it in. 

That may have been laziness, because I can't help but think that I was as conservative as the day is long back then, as conservative as Dad. The only restraint he felt, I know, was the restraint he saw and experienced in a good friend from right across the alley, a soft-spoken man, greatly respected, who went, at the time, rather full-bore over the edge, even Birch Society (I went along once). The neighbor became a recruiter. That he was more than a breaker overboard didn't suit my dad. Some governor in his political system told him going whole hog was over the top--and he didn't. I'd love to ask him why. My guess is he was more of a conservative than a political conservative-- an everything-in-moderation conservative. 

That was mid-Sixties. It's apparent from the unsubmitted form up top that I was "political," something I inherited from Dad, who would eat breakfast with me at the little bar built between the kitchen and the dining room, while the Today show, with Dave Garraway (and sometimes his pet monkey) would entertain. The Today Show, back then, was no extravaganza, but it spent a good deal of time with "the news." Thusly, I inherited my dad's addictions: we were both news junkies. 

I don't have a Republican party receipt for 1966 (the one I have is 1965), my high school senior year, but I might have. I went out to northwest Iowa to school because a friend of mine said he thought I could play basketball right away at Dordt College. I wasn't thinking about politics, nor was I thinking much about the Vietnam War, which was raging in 1966. Somewhere--I haven't been able to find it--I have a three-page high school essay bedecked with a title: "Why Are We in Vietnam?" an anti-commie diatribe for the war effort by way of arguments that were likely Republican bullet points, if in fact there were bullet points back then. 

I think I stayed a Republican for a while. At Dordt College I certainly wouldn't have had profs who argued against the war, nor any Democrats. In fact, that I had no profs that dared lift a finger against Nixon, and that they didn't, became, after a fashion, the reason I came to shift allegiances. I felt isolated, so far out of the mainstream of American society that I couldn't help thinking there had to be another whole worldview, a way of understanding ourselves in this world, that looked at those body bags lifted from army transports in a way that I didn't understand, but thousands of kids my age--"what was I missing?"-- certainly and passionately did. 

Somewhere into my sophomore year--I can remember where I was on the sidewalk outside of the classroom building--I started thinking about something other than athletics, and I think it was Emerson and Thoreau--American Romantics--who somehow inspired me with all their idealism. Imagine that--it wasn't some leftie prof; it was hard core American literary figures. American Lit was the class I was on my way to attending that day, when, right there on the sidewalk, I had a some kind of epiphany, nothing as spacious as Emerson transparent eyeball, but the kind of sudden inspiration that I vividly remember. I suddenly saw myself as an adult, in an adult world: I would be a teacher, and teach literature. 

Right there on the sidewalk, I decided that was what I'd do with my life. Sports wasn't doing it anymore--I'd been a gym rat for most of my life, carried an addiction that didn't wear off quickly, even though my participation in athletics did at about that time.

Something happened to me that year--an abominable academic year--that changed me and changed my life. But then such things happened that year to lots of folks, events that changed everybody's lives--it was 1968. After that moment on the sidewalk, I was no started to question my dad's politics. Somewhere there, I was no longer a Young Republican.