Politics of My Life – Part III

Still have the Y-K glasses we used to toast in the new millennium

In 2000, we had just survived the Y-2K fiasco (there was some concern all computers would crash because they wouldn’t recognize the new century). I was foolishly hopeful that a person of integrity and intelligence would be the next president. I remember reading about George W. Bush in a magazine at the doctor’s office. How could a man who had basically failed at everything in his life, from his businesses and governing Texas, possibly win the Republican nomination? Could it be his last name? Gore v. Bush, was decided by hanging chads in Florida. I will never accept that Gore actually lost and wish he had fought harder. How different our country would be had he won. People laughed at his concern for the environment and what he called “global warming.” Who’s laughing now? 

Of course, what Bush is most famous for is being president on 9/11. Like most people, I vividly remember where I was when the Twin Towers fell and we were attacked. I was at Cherry Preschool preparing for the first day of school. 2001 was still a relatively innocent time. Internet news and cell phones were not that common yet, so the staff gathered in our Community Room around the small television we used for playing training videotapes. And our world changed. I remember thinking that this was impossible but also that our country was under attack. And then I looked at the clock and said, “Turn it off.” Kids would start arriving at 9:00. We missed the horrors that continued through the morning – the planes crashing in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon, the bodies falling, the collapse of the towers. At lunch hour, we gathered around that small TV and watched all of these in stunned silence. But we knew more kids and families would be coming for afternoon classes and we had to pull it together. I’m not sure how it happened, but we decided to go outside and somehow find a way to comfort ourselves so we could go through the first day of school for yet another group of preschoolers. We put our arms around each other singing “God Bless America.” We had become a sisterhood mourning the death of so many and loss of our nation’s innocence. But we were also a sisterhood of resilience, strength, and purpose. Others joined us – the women who worked next door, the mail carrier, passersby who parked their cars and entered our huge group hug.

For a period of time, our country, united in grief, was patriotic. People gathered with lit candles and sang songs of unity and love of country. But Bush soon launched his war on terror, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, looking for “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist, creating the Department of Homeland Security, and passing the Patriot Act, which expanded surveillance powers to federal agencies to fight terrorism. Who knew at the time where that would lead us by 2026? Domestically, Bush signed major education reform. I disagreed with No Child Left Behind because I thought the testing was excessive and the learning standards focused too heavily on math and science.

I became a grandparent to twin girls in 2003, followed by two more granddaughters in 2006 and our first grandson in 2009. This and my job occupied much of my time. I was disappointed that Bush defeated John Kerry to win a second term, by “swift boating” him to somehow turn a war hero into an unpatriotic man through unfair and untrue political attack using “alternative facts” – a sadly familiar political tactic. So, four more years. Most of what I remember Bush’s second term for was appointing Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court, mishandling Hurricane Katrina (“You did a heck of a job, Brownie”), and the 2008 financial crisis. Bush had turned out to be the type of president depicted in that magazine article I had read in the doctor’s office. But personally, I had my hands full of babies.

Next, a political miracle. Barack Obama and Joe Biden beat John McCain and Sarah Palin (remember her – she was fit for office because she could see Russia from her window). I’ll never forget his appearance in Grant Park. Yes we can. Yes we did. Hope and change had finally arrived and I was euphoric. He inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression and passed legislation to combat it. He passed the Affordable Care Act, one of the greatest achievements I had seen in my lifetime. Women’s rights felt secure. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor (the first Hispanic justice) and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Under his command Osama bin Laden was killed and Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was ended, allowing gay Americans to serve openly in the military. His cabinet reflected the diversity of our country. He was the first African American president. We had turned a page to a new and more just era. Anything seemed possible.

Of course, Obama wasn’t perfect. Even after the horror of Sandy Hook, in which 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members were slaughtered by a disturbed man with a gun, no progress was made toward gun safety. And the Merrick Garland nomination to the Supreme Court was a fiasco. Still, he was a caring, decent, compassionate human being. I was so moved by his singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who had been killed in a shooting at a Charleston church. For eight years, I was proud of our president and our country. The fact that he defeated two decent Republican candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, speaks to a time far different from the one in which we have lived for the past decade.

Although I knew of Trump through The Apprentice, I never watched the show and considered it garbage, fake reality TV. Trump first reared his ugly head in my consciousness as the man who took out full page ads in The New York Times calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, five Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused and convicted in the brutal 1989 assault of a white female jogger. Even after they were exonerated in 2002 he kept up his vile attack. When Obama was running for president in 2008, Trump was a leader of the “birther movement,” claiming Obama was not born in Hawaii, not eligible to be president. I will never forget Obama’s roast of Trump in 2011 at White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Like many, I laughed at someone I considered a buffoon. Little did I know back then that this humiliation of Trump ignited the flame that would consume the rest of the politics of my life.

No more old presidents!

I write this as an eighty-year-old woman who looks back on the past nine years of my life firmly believing this is no country for old men. Trump was 78 when he defeated Kamala Harris in 2024. Biden was also 78 when he beat Trump in 2020. IMHP, no one close to my age should be president. While I was delighted when Biden defeated Trump, it was only because of how much I loathed Trump. And those feelings were based on Trump I, who at least had some qualified advisors who protected him and us from his worst instincts. When Biden won the 2000 election, it was the start of COVID and he mostly campaigned online. Once in office, his age showed, culminating in his disastrous debate with Trump that ultimately forced him to withdraw, leaving Kamala Harris to attempt the impossible. Now, I live in Trump II, truly terrible times with a president suffering from dementia, surrounded by incompetent lackeys and evil ultra-right wing, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, misogynistic, and cruel people calling the shots. The inhumanity of ICE and the Border Patrol running amok in blue cities, killing protesting citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and deporting brown and black people is astonishing to me. It’s easy to manipulate and hard to restrain the impulses of an old fool like Trump.

My heart breaks for my grandkids who have never known anything better. So, I keep on keeping on. Happy to be among my family, friends, and neighbors at the No Kings rallies. Making as many donations as I can afford to good causes and promising young politicians. David Hogg is a 25-year-old gun control activist, organizer of March for our Lives after surviving the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He is now co-founder of Leaders We Deserve, an organization that tells us we need to work to elect “young progressives to Congress and State Legislatures across the country to help defeat the far-right agenda and advance a progressive vision for the future.” As I said back at the University of Michigan in 1967, right on!