I Believe in Being Subject to Ronald Reagan

Back when I was pretty young, Ronald Reagan decided to give a speech in Hooper. Who in the world knows why Bonzo chose the city best known for its annual Tomato Days celebration, but he did, and my parents packed us kids up to go see him.

It was a lesson in tolerance and respect for me as a child. I knew very well how much my parents disliked President Reagan. We're a staunch family of Democrats, going back to when my great-grandpa was a union organizer at Kennecott. My parents had not only voted against Reagan but had been strong Jimmy Carter supporters.

Yet when the President of the United States came out to give a speech, my parents hauled us out to hear him. Early in the morning, in a misty, foggy rain.

After the speech, we went back home and watched across the street as every child at Clinton Elementary poured out in front of the school to see Ronald Reagan and his entourage of black armored vehicles drove by. There must have been a few hundred kids there, but all I remember is that the black cars didn't slow down even a little bit. But, boy, those kids saw the car the President was riding in.

In the years that followed, I remember being inundated with patriotic nonsense at my schools. For a few years, I don't think six months went by without "God Bless the U.S.A." blaring out of the school speakers. We held frequent and passionate assemblies devoted to inculcating in us a "love" of country and government leaders.

And all the while, the Iran-Contra hearings were being held. I remember hearing one of my older brothers denounce Oliver North as a liar and a lawbreaker, and how one of his friends (who later pulled a gun on some of the other kids in the neighborhood) puffed out his chest and declared that Ollie was a true American hero. When I was in high school, recently-elected Senator Bob Bennett came to school to speak. He struck me as a reasonably intelligent individual, and when he opened up the floor for questions, I got up and asked him some reasonable foreign policy questions, knowing that I would disagree with his responses. The brief article from the local newspaper quoting my question and Senator Bennett's response is still in my scrapbook, where my mother put it the day it came out.

For all the patriotic zeal that enveloped our conservative community and to which I was forcibly exposed at school (despite my protestations that Ronald Reagan was a dork and our policy disagreements with folks like Bob Bennett), my parents never once called up my teachers or principals or the school district or any outside group to protest. My parents simply did not feel it inappropriate for the schools to teach me to support the President or our Senators or even our lecherous Representatives in Congress, even if they and I disagreed with his policies. School, to my parents, was a place where you learned critical thinking, in very large part, by listening to opposing points of view.

So, at a very young age, I learned that in a pluralistic democracy like ours, you learn to tolerate those with whom you disagree. That in fact, you listen to and talk with and have rational discussions with people with whom you disagree. You respect the results of elections, even when the country elects warmongers and liars and lawbreakers and adulterers.

Just last year, my dad and I drove up to Logan to listen to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and talked all the way home about how wrongheaded and hypocritical and intellectually dishonest his brand of judicial conservatism often is.


Now, I don't know what would have happened had any of my schools put on any kind of programs supporting, say, Jimmy Carter or Gunn McKay. I'm sure my parents wouldn't have minded. And I tend to think that while there might have been some grumbling, the folks in my community back then might have simply shrugged and moved on.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe there would have been a public outcry. The school's principal might have publicly apologized. Shoot, the school district might have even adopted policies requiring parental consent to allow children to hear the man their countrymen elected as President.

But then again, Jimmy Carter and Gunn McKay would have been white.