How Ronald Reagan turned me into a Democrat

I made a reference to this on Facebook the other day, so, by way of explaining, here’s the story of how President Reagan bears at least part of the responsibility for making me a Democrat:

When I was seven years old, we were on a visit to see family in Atlanta, and at some point we drove past a (presumably) homeless man passed out in the grass next to a church. I can still remember that he wore a trench coat, and that the church had a rock wall that I still associate with cathedrals, and that it was cloudy outside. As you can tell, it made an impression. Apparently I was pretty upset by the idea that this man lived on the streets, and I wanted to Do Something ™. Being the Great Society Liberal that she is (“You know what this calls for? Federal government intervention!”), my mother suggested that I write the president and tell him how I felt.

Looking back, I’m not sure what Mom was thinking. After all, at that point we were seven years into the presidency of the man the shock of whose election she still blames for a wreck she was in back in November ’81. For a while there I honestly thought his first name was “Thatsonuvabitch”. But I was still at that idealistic age where the president is The President, and I had absolute faith in the power of citizens – especially precocious little girls – to effect change. So I wrote my letter, and was amazed that Mom knew the president’s address.

In my letter, I wrote that I didn’t understand why the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world allowed people to suffer in poverty. I probably said something rudimentary about how people who have bear a moral obligation to help those who have not. And after a full page of this, at the very end of the letter – I’m talking one or two sentences at the end – I wrote that the mistreatment of animals bothered me, too. (This is important – that part was maybe 5% of the whole thing.)

A few weeks later, I got my response. First of all, I have to give Reagan credit – he remains the only politician I’ve ever written whose response acknowledged not only that an actual human being had read my letter, but that he was not personally responding. It began (paraphrasing here), “President Reagan is very busy; this is his secretary.” I respect that. But it went downhill from there.

The response letter was basically the inverse of my original letter. It focused almost entirely on the president’s love of animals – he and Mrs. Reagan even had a ranch out West with lots of horses! And then, at the very end, and oh-by-the-way: President Reagan agrees with you that it’s tragic how some people don’t have a place to live, but he feels like they should take personal responsibility and not rely on the government to fix their problems.

Again, I respect the consistency of Reagan’s conservative philosophy. But I don’t really think that a letter to an earnest seven-year-old child who can’t sleep because she’s guilty that she has a roof and blankets and some people don’t is really the appropriate venue for going into that philosophy. A bit of context: I still believed that my stuffed animals had souls. You’re going to get all Adam Smith on me?

My response was basically “WTF?” (though that wouldn’t be in my vocabulary for another decade or so). A little child with pigtails who thinks her Ewok is a real person tells you she’s worried about homeless people and you say, “Yeah, well, it’s their own fault”?

What about the war veterans screwed over by their government, or the families living in one hotel after another even though they’re working three part-time jobs? The only reason a person would be homeless in the United States is because they’re lazy? Really? No other factors that MAYBE the government could do something about? And that even when people DO f*ck up, our society doesn’t have any obligation but to throw up our hands and go spend another few billion dollars on a dumbass missile shield? Really???

Not that I could articulate any of that at age seven. What I did understand, though, for the first time, was that not everybody sees the world the same way. And that however President Reagan saw the world, I didn’t want any part of it.

The next year, I begged Mom to take us to see Michael Dukakis at a rally following the presidential debate at Wake Forest (I brought a purse full of Nilla Wafers – never unprepared). He lost, but four years later there I was in Pilot Mountain Middle School telling the other seventh graders why Bill Clinton should win. In later years, asking the person calling from the DNC if I could use my parents’ checks to make a gift (I was 14), getting my own subscription to Newsweek and arguing with my social studies teachers about supply-side economics.

All because of Reagan. Now, given my family’s leanings, I probably would’ve ended up as a Democrat anyway. But I doubt I would’ve had quite the level of passion, especially so early on. I owe Ronnie one, I guess. I never thought I’d say this, but… Thank you, President Reagan. You’ve done a beautiful thing.