Tears to Remember
On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1980, my 10th-grade American history teacher started class by unfurling The New York Times. She pointed to its triple banner headline: “Reagan Easily Beats Carter; Republicans Gain in Congress; D’Amato and Dodd are Victors.”
“Save this paper,” she told us. “This is the start of a whole new era.”
And it was. An era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency. In short, it was the start of our current era. The Reagan Revolution was the formative political experience of my generation’s lifetime, like the Great Depression, the Second World War or Vietnam for those before us. And in its intellectual and moral paucity, in its eventual hegemony, these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way.
This post bugged me on so many levels. So the last 28 years were a big waste? On one level it was like having your father annul a marriage after 30 years, thereby making you, the child, non-existent. On another level, a hyperbolic one I suppose, it scared me. Her post felt a bit Khmer Rouge. Because this is the type of attitude or viewpoint that Pol Pot decided to unleash on Cambodia all those years ago. "Let's get back to the way we were (and not in Babs' scattered pictures sense). We'll call it Year Zero!" Well we know the rest of that story. And wasn't it nice? Mass murder, hell on earth.
OK, I'm pretty sure Judith isn't Pol Pot; but they share a sentiment. Democrats aren't Stalin, but they share a sentiment. They have the same DNA.
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