I was raised liberal, very liberal. My Mom was a beatnik and my Dad was an anti-war vet. But I was also raised to think for myself, so there came a time when I questioned what they had taught me, and had to choose what to believe.
But even so, what I chose, was that I was a lefty. A Democrat (back when that still meant something). I didn’t know the word back then, but a progressive. Because of something I saw when I was a kid.
I was eight or nine years old, the early 1970s. This was the era of “busing.” “Busing” was a divisive issue that inflamed the whole country. “Busing” came to stand in as a shorthand for civil rights, race relations, “affirmative action” and the whole freighted issue of the legacy of slavery in this country.
“Busing” was an effort to de-segregate public schools by forcibly mixing the students of schools, black and white, by yes, sending the kids by bus to other schools in their area. Black kids got bussed to affluent white schools, and white kids to more impoverished black schools.
Looking back as an adult, that was probably a bad idea, working out the long tail of slavery on the backs of schoolkids who didn’t even understand what was happening. I don’t think it was very popular with anyone – kids from both races were pulled from their communities and sent to school with strangers up to an hour’s bus ride away. This happened in both the North and the South as I recall. It was the answer to segregation and the whole country was transfixed by it. Black parents didn’t like their kids being sent to be picked on by strange kids and teachers. And white parents … didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids. Yes, that was the central problem. I know this because I saw it.
One Sunday we were at my grandparent’s house for dinner in Des Plaines, IL, and I was watching the nightly news on the big console TV. Sitting cross-legged in front of it, a little girl learning about the world.
A segment came on about “busing.” It was about unrest in Boston. Busing was very unpopular there. People were forcibly resisting it, blockading schools and busses, so the plan could be defeated by physically preventing the kids from attending. It was a mess.
I wasn’t old enough to understand the depth and complexity and long history of race relations. (Even in college they didn’t teach the truth of Reconstruction as the miserable failure it was.) But I was old enough to understand what I saw before me on the TV screen.
A florid, beefy white man in a plaid shirt standing in the door of a schoolbus in South Boston, and beating the little black kids who were trying to exit the bus, with a club.
I will never forget it. It is burned into my memory. His red, screaming face. The blue and white shirt. The club. The little kids, kids my age, shielding their heads from the club as they just tried to go to school.
I had a dim understanding that he was worried about his own kids and their future. But he was worried because they had to be in the same space as black kids. That was what he was most worried about. That was the chief threat. Not the isolation from friends or peers, or the lack of extracurriculars because of the long bus rides home. No. The color of these kid’s skin. That’s what he was worried about.
I saw that, and I thought, I stand against everything this man stands for and I always will.
And I had a pretty good idea, too, of what that was. “Traditional values.” The church. Fear-mongering about commies. Women as second-class citizens, people of color as non-people. Bad economics and a kind of performative rah-rah “patriotism” that I already knew was bogus. It all went together. Hating on “busing” because you hate black people and don’t want your kids around them. Squares. John Birchers. Republicans. Bad people.
Values are very important to me. I believe every single person has it in them to do the right thing if they look into their heart. At any moment, you have the free will to stop and change your decision and do the right thing.
Instead, this guy chose to beat little kids with a club. Ten toes down, this guy went there and did that. Beat kids. With a club.
So I saw real early the hate and cruelty that fueled conservative politics. You could explain and rationalize that guy’s thinking as “economic uncertainty” or “malaise” or whatever you like, but what it led him to actually do was beat kids with a club.
A few years later when Reagan was elected, I was horrified. I couldn’t believe it. Morning in America, what a bunch of bullshit. I knew we were giving the country over to people like the guy with the club.
Forty-five years later, we are still feeling the effects of that. Reaganomics. The Christian Right. The loss of the Fairness Doctrine. Rollbacks on civil rights everywhere, for women, for queers, for people of color.
That man is long dead now, the man with the club, but we are living in the world he fought for.
And I still stand against him and his club and everything he believed to this day. It’s simple to me. It’s a matter of right and wrong. My parents may have been eccentric hipsters, but they DID teach me right from wrong, and I will never forget.
Atlantis Fallen 