It was 1985 or so.
Sometimes the peace group I belonged to met in our living room. We stored the old hand-crank Gestetner in our back room, the coldest one, uninhabitable even by brave noble young anarchists like ourselves. Hell, even the most working class among us (me) had grownup with reliable heat, paid for by mom and dad.
So we lived mostly in the front room, huddled over big mugs of tea and eating box after box of Kraft Dinner.
One night when I was eating, Ronald Reagan was too.
The news was on and he was at some state dinner, up on the dais, listening to a guy at the microphone. He held a forkful of food to his mouth, put it in and started chewing.
That's the exact moment I stopped hating Ronald Reagan.
I owned punk rock albums with his face, disfigured, on the cover. I’d been chanting “Ronald Reagan/he's no good/send him back to Hollywood” pretty much every weekend for, what, five years at that point? People made dart boards with his face on it, burned him in effigy, put on Ronald Reagan Halloween masks and did goofy street theatre at our demos.
My then-boyfriend was sitting right beside me, muttering something, smoking my cigarettes again. Could he tell?
I just stared straight ahead, trying to keep my bearings as the bizarre sensation of Not Hating Ronald Reagan rushed through me like a shot of whatever that was the dentist gave me once.
What was I going to do? (...)
That night, I saw Ronald Reagan — for the first time ever, I’m ashamed to say — as a human being, just like me, who ate and breathed and loved people and had people who loved him.
It's too late to say I’m sorry, but not to say that he was right about a lot of things and I was wrong.
(An excerpt from Kathy Shaidle's e-book Acoustic Ladyland, which Mark Steyn has called "a must-read. You need this book.")
Comments
I feel the same way, only it happened to me much later after he was gone. I was raised by a die hard liberal feminist mother, and carried her values until I met and married a loving Christian traditional values man.
I realized that if I could be so wrong about the supposed 'cruelty' of conservatives, then I could be wrong about a lot of things - and with that newly opened mind, I found myself crying while watching a documentary about Mr. Reagan. I prayed for him to forgive me.
I will definately buy the book. As the old saying goes "youth is wasted on the young". I believe the voting age should be raised to 21 to 23. Voting kids have no life experience relevant to what's being voted on to make a good asssessment of the candidate or issue. Or maybe when they starting looking at how much money is being taken from their paychecks and redistributed not only to the poor, but the lazy and the ignorant. Glad you saw the light.
ronald reagan is a human... but a human who had too much power for one person to have.. and altho with any power can come mistakes, the mistakes and choices that he made that had negative results. didnt just hurt a few people... it hurt MANY... i have never stopped hating ronald reagan.
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