Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is back on THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD – A political history, Part 2. JFK, Inequality, and a Broken Heart, Oh My! She writes:

The 1960 election was quite the event in that brief window before presidential assassinations, mass demonstrations, riots and the like turned America upside down and inside out. It was pleasant enough to be a Republican with a calm, golfing, war hero at the helm in the ’50s. He had a vice President who was considerably less appealing. Up to the 1960 election, the electorate seemed interested in serious, responsible, wise, “regular”-looking presidents.

And suddenly there appeared a rock star. Young, rich, sophisticated, witty, urbane, and very good-looking with a charming young wife and a couple of adorable tots, John Fitzgerald Kennedy dazzled America’s influencers. That definitely included the media, which could not have been more enchanted with JFK had he given them lap dances.

I never wavered in my PUBLIC support for Nixon. My mother was a county co-chair of the Republican Party and, in that capacity, she actually got to shake the hand of Richard Milhous Nixon. Her Republican friends told her not to wash her hand and not a few other people told her to count her fingers.

But, C’MON, man! JFK had an effect! I was a 14-year-old girl. Principles are cool and all, but it was hard not to be swept away by the clever young man who talked funny and spoke glowingly of “vigah.” It made you aspire to “vigah.” I once went on a 50-mile hike (with Ladiehawke and Heather) as he had recommended! By the time of the 1960 election, we had a black and white television and we watched the historic debates between this fetching young man and a sweaty, five-o’clock shadowed weird guy.

To this day, I don’t even remember what they disagreed about. There were some odd debating points about two islands that may or may not have been critical to national security – Quemoy and Matsu – that nobody I knew had ever heard of before that night, nor ever again going forward. Maybe they tipped over, like Guam. Somebody alert poor Hank.

Were there ANY programmatic differences? Both men were veterans and patriots. Both men said they loved America. It seems about 60 years ago now – oh wait, it WAS 62 years ago! We haven’t seen his like in the Democrat Party since, not even Obama. Every one of JFK’s presidential speeches would get him banned from Twitter today. Never mind what would have been his fierce opposition to abortion. Had the Press Corps – virtually all male – approached his notorious womanizing with the “rigah” that they investigated the number of scoops of ice cream Donald J. Trump consumed at State Dinners, some of the bloom might have come off that rose.

In retrospect, you almost have to feel sorry for Nixon in the way I would feel sorry for myself standing next to Melania, even on my best hair day 50 years ago. I mean, it’s just not FAIR. And all kids have an innate devotion to “fairness.” Which brings us to Civil Rights.

Let me say that in all my travels, I have never had a bad day in the South. I love the way Southerners talk, the food they eat, their manners, their hospitality. I will call my friend Jim Jackson and ask him to “Talk like Lindsey Graham” and he can do a perfect impression! I have observed several times that the day-to-day RELATIONS between black and white people in the South are much more cordial and personal than in the North.

But, oh my goodness, the OPTICS back in the Bad Olde Days were TERRIBLE. It was not possible to avoid being moved by the sight of young African-American students who wanted nothing more than to attend school, walking a gauntlet of terror and abuse. To me, the horrors of the lynching pictures, the beaten bodies, as awful as they were, got to me less than the hatred on the contorted faces of the white grownups – even women! — screaming obscenities at young people trying to sit at a lunch counter or enter a school door. It was as mystifying to us as it was horrifying. And altogether heartbreaking. I wish America could have a do-over.

I became “radicalized” around Civil Rights. Racism rocked my world from afar. Whether in the Olympics or a State Basketball Tournament, I always rooted for the team with the most athletes of color. I marched and wore ribbons and petitioned and argued with my peers. It goes without saying that that all counts for spit now. I am declared by Ibram X. Kendi and all his grifting imitators to be just as racist as any pointy headed sheet-wearer. I am genetically racist and must throw myself on any random sword in the vicinity. Which I find heartbreaking and also infuriating. But it is what it is.

In my early college years I was a Goldwater Girl. My first serious boyfriend was a fan of Ayn Rand. I thought Ayn should have stuck to political treatises as her novels were wretched tomes filled with cardboard characters who spoke page after page of dialogue that no human has ever said to another. But she had a lot of the politics right for sure. She was prescient. Because she had been there before.

Anyway, that boyfriend was a Republican. I have a previous column in which I discuss the two of us going alone on the El to the South Side of Chicago to be poll watchers in 1964 for an election we weren’t yet old enough to vote in. Native Chicagoans did not believe we had returned alive. We were too stupid even to be afraid. And the cheating we witnessed, even almost 60 years ago, was mind-boggling and right out in the open.

Sadly, Republican though he be, that boyfriend was not at all a good guy. I finally broke up with him when I learned he had re-gifted a very expensive Christmas present I had given him to another girl in my dorm. Classy! It was a large glossy coffee table book. At least he had had the grace to tear out the fly-leaf where I had signed it with eternal love and such.

Less than a week later, I walked into the Student Union and asked to sit in a six-person booth that held four strangers and one guy I vaguely knew. One of those strangers was a very attractive guy smoking a cigarette, checking me out, and cracking wise. The others all left at various intervals to go to a class. We stayed behind, talking, laughing, skipping our classes, not for the last time. He quit smoking eventually, but is still cracking wise some 56 years later.

But – catch this! – he was a liberal Jewish Democrat! Uh-oh. AND, as a future lawyer, he was an even better “arguer” than I was, champion debater though I had been in high school. Often the only way I could “win” a political argument was to cry, which I realize is not sporting at all. This was decades before Law Students at Georgetown got their own “crying room.” Oy vey. Law Students! “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!” I didn’t need a designated room; I was a real emotional girl and could cry anywhere. And did.

I think that one of the most difficult things to do is to keep two conflicting opinions in your head at once and acknowledge that each has merit. Many people – virtually everyone on CNN or The View, for example – will call one opinion Scripture and the other “mis-or-disinformation”. But, it is a false dichotomy.

No honest or sane person can pretend that 250 years of slavery and another 100 years of discrimination have no bearing on a people’s culture and behavior going forward. However, neither can we say that nearly 60 years – 3 generations — of Civil Rights Legislation, and close to 50 years of preferential treatment labeled “Affirmative Action” have meant nothing. And, in any event, human beings have agency and responsibility for their decisions and actions, even under the most deplorable conditions.

But, all that was yet to develop on that fateful day in 1966 when I fell almost instantly in love. Mercifully, there was yet no CNN, and though the media still “leaned” left, it was not out in the open and there were counterweights of viewpoint. Newspapers were more evenly-divided in political outlook.

As for my new boyfriend and me, we had many points of overlap in our most deeply held beliefs. We agreed that bigotry (usually called “prejudice” back when black people wanted to be called Negroes) was wrong, that killing inconvenient babies was barbaric, and also illegal at the time, and that “the fundamental things – marriage, taking responsibility for your children, working — apply, as Time goes by.”

We approached each person we encountered as a unique individual. Why, once, we even sat for a few hours with a deranged woman in full Nazi regalia in the Student Union as we debated in a shockingly civil fashion her grotesque politics. (I doubt I could be that civilized today…) Nobody needed a “safe space” and nobody kicked her out of the building though she was not even a Northwestern student! Ah, free expression! I remember it fondly.

I guess at that stage, we would have been called classic “liberals,” not leftists. Not to worry – that would come later, but at least we still couldn’t vote yet.

Next Week – Part 3 – Vietnam.