The first presidential election I could vote in was 1984, Reagan v Mondale. I’m still ticked because Reagan lied and got away with it. Sure, he could have just changed his mind later but ‘revenue enhancement’ was just a fancy way of saying ‘tax increase’ so I kinda doubt it.

I did not vote for Reagan. I didn’t have high hopes for Reagan, except in one category: abortion. In Fourth Grade I supported Roe V Wade as almost Solomonic in its wisdom. Then I read the thing. Needless to say, I was less impressed. My still young logic was that the embryo had to be human as it couldn’t be a puppy. I phrase it better nowadays when I have occasion to argue with someone dumb enough to think unborn babies aren’t human but even my eleven year old reasoning was better than the idiocy that is Roe V. Wade.*

One job, Ron. You only had ONE JOB as far as I was concerned. Surely the first Republican president since the Roe decision with a Republican Congress to back him up would set the world to rights on their only strong issue. No, not so much.

Those are the only two things that I really have against the Reagan presidency. I am less upset now than I was then about Iran Contra and I’m not truly sure the president didn’t have the power. Probably shouldn’t have had it, but that’s on Congress. No, I don’t think North was justified in lying to Congress. If the Supreme Court is stupid enough to let Congress issue subpoenas then those are the rules we have to play by. Suck it up.

I will admit, Reagan wasn’t nearly as bad a president as I thought at the time. He also wasn’t nearly as good as people wish to believe. Excellent on foreign policy, really sucky on hard issues like abortion and didn’t have the stomach to follow through on his campaign promises to cut spending. On the whole, not so bad at all. Still ticked about the election, though.

Democrats follow through. Unfortunately, they follow through when they really, really shouldn’t. Sanity isn’t a strong suit and power is all they seem to really care about anymore. Maybe it was that way when I was a kid. I hope not – my parents were proud to be Democrats. That was part of why it was so hard to admit I wasn’t a Democrat until years after I’d stopped voting for them.

I took one of those silly political spectrum tests as an undergrad while Reagan was still in office. It said I was libertarian. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative as we defined it back then. Now I’d like to punch the idiot that developed that thing. Cartesian chart with neither rhyme nor reason supposedly defines your political position? Nonsense.

Most people don’t HAVE positions on most issues. They will parrot the media if backed into a corner and otherwise ignore the stuff that doesn’t impact them. They will give opinions on things they have never even thought about because they are taught to believe educated people know all this stuff and have opinions about everything. Balderdash. Educated people know how to find out about the things they don’t already know and how to form an informed opinion rather than repeat whatever CNN said.

We failed this whole educating people thing.

Nowadays, we think a human being’s entire range of thought can be summed up in one word. And that if their sum word isn’t the same as our sum word then the country is falling apart.

We survived Carter who I loved but let’s face it, wasn’t really good at the job. We survived Reagan who I didn’t like but who was the bane of the Soviet Union. We survived George Senior who I felt sorry for because he was coming in after a very popular president and things went predictably awry. We survived Clinton who I voted for twice and now wish I hadn’t. We survived George Junior who really stunk at foreign policy. We survived Obama – the less said the better as I try not to use those words. Give me a few decades. We survived Trump who I thought would be horrible but really wasn’t half bad. We’ll survive Biden or whoever is presently running the country.

But we need to stop just surviving and start running this railroad.

That’s easier for me to say – I’m old and cranky. I won’t have to do most of the work. But it’s also harder because I can look back on a lot of mistakes (Clinton? TWICE?). This is the ‘listen you whippersnappers, you don’t know as much as you think you do’ portion of our day. My generation wasn’t taught to think nearly as well as we should have been – I was an atheist for ten years based on a really, really stupid logic error. It’s only gotten worse with time.

They can’t make correct change without a calculator. They can’t read cursive. And they have never been taught how to discuss anything with anyone that disagrees with them. They are the tolerant ones who tolerate nothing.

And I thought I was stupid with that logical fallacy thing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Things they are a’changing. Trump while not even in office got done what Reagan never could – Roe has been overturned. The pendulum is shifting very much to the right.

But it’s just a stupid pendulum. If we don’t use the momentum to make the changes that we need to in order to make America America again, then it won’t matter. Our children’s children won’t know how to define woman or how to do arithmetic.

It’s not enough to have a red wave – we have to ride that wave. Guide our representatives into the policies that we have decided upon. Not just what Fox says is a good idea – what we have considered ourselves.

We aren’t well equipped. But you don’t need the fanciest board, just one you can ride. You don’t need to understand everything, just use the stuff you do understand and seek out understanding on the things you need to understand better.

I don’t think this is the end for America. I think we’re on the cusp of something new and great. I don’t think it will be easy but nothing worthwhile is. More than anything else, though, I think we have to govern our government. We the People need to BE We the People. United in our values, our beliefs and our country, we can fight like cats and dogs settling who has to take out the trash.

Our feistiness is part of what makes us Americans. Don’t be afraid of it and don’t let it rule us. We have to be the America we want America to be. Tautology, yes, but true. We can’t just let our government run wild and we can’t just turn it around in any old direction. But we can take the reins and get good at riding this horse again.

We have to if we want the America we love to be there for our children’s children’s children.

*Roe does not make the argument that the unborn are not human. In fact it explicitly states that the unborn child is human. Roe argues about what constitutes a person – dehumanizing without actually denying the child’s humanity in a slick and nauseating bit of deception. But at age eleven, I didn’t make the finer distinction and the media back then was still arguing that the baby wasn’t really human.